- Advice and Various Other Unsorted Links
- 4d20 Adventure Hooks & How To Use Them
- Repetitive battles in dnd « Blog of Holding: Twenty ways to make a goblin encounter different (works for any monster)
- Dungeons & Dutch Ovens: Sandboxes and Quagmires: Common pitfalls in sandbox game sand what to do about it
- Against The Wicked City: OSR aesthetics of ruin: Why it makes sense to run your campaign amidst ruins
- The Alexandrian » Opening Your Game Table: The Open Game Table is also discussed in a three part series: 1,2, 3
- Goblin Punch: Building Houses for Murderhoboes: Some thoughts for people unhappy with the party playing a bunch of murderous do-no-gooders
- Hack & Slash: On Campaign Design Patterns: Linear structure, a safe base for the party
- The Alexandrian » The Railroading Manifesto: What is railroading?
- Playing D&D With Porn Stars: Chokers And Chandlers: a lot of territory between the total sandbox and the total railroad
- Playing D&D With Porn Stars: A Method For Making A D&D Sandbox: 25 steps to start and run a sandbox
- The Alexandrian » Thought of the Day – Juggling Scenario Hooks in a Sandbox: a sandbox will have many hooks; the trick is preparing situations
- I’ll See It When I Believe It: Making Knowledge Valuable: How to make sure that gathering information is a useful activity.
- Goblin Punch: 4 Legs of the Table Mimic: Where Interesting Combat Comes From
- Roles, Rules, and Rolls: The Mediocrity of Improvisation
- Playing D&D With Porn Stars: Die-Drop Instadungeon + Continuing Adventures of Mandy, Zak & Raggi: Using drop die charts to generate a lot of information at the same time.
- Playing D&D With Porn Stars: Zak’s EZ Adventure-Making Chart: Write a little matrix describing the relations of all the parties in an adventure.
- Roles, Rules, and Rolls: Endless Bag of Tricks (Download): The download link is in the sidebar!
- Playing D&D With Porn Stars: The “One More Idea” Method: Start simple and stupid, then go through everything, adding one thing. Then do it again. And again. Iteratively build something cool.
- RENFIELD’S CAT: Advice for the Newly Afflicted
- The Alexandrian » Thought of the Day – Bloat in Extended Narratives: Keep an eye on the pace at which new arc-plots are introduced.
- Bat in the Attic: The Rise and Fall of Roleplaying campaigns.: List of the most common reasons that end sandbox campaigns.
- Monsters and Manuals: Hack and Slash vs. Titanic Struggles, or the Goblin Massacre and Giant Slaying Approaches: decide! Will your game be about killing a lot of weaker enemies or about killing one incredibly strong opponent?
- Telecanter’s Receding Rules: 5 OSR Table Types: Several different types of tables and strengths thereof
- Hack & Slash: On a Guide for New Dungeon Masters
- Hack & Slash: Techniques to increase player agency
- Dreams in the Lich House: Say Yes; Skill Checks in a Rules-Lite-System
- The Architect DM: How real life locations can be applied to a D&D game
- Lamentations of the Flame Princess: Making your campaign METAL!
- Beyond the Black Gate: High Fantasy Campaigns
- Playing D&D With Porn Stars: Songs Useful In D&D Games Renamed To Reflect The Situations Wherein I Have Used Or Plan To Use Said Music
- Jeff’s Gameblog: how to Awesome-Up Your Players
- Kellri’s Old School Encounter Reference
- Gorgonmilk: Boiling Down Your Campaign To Its Essential Salts
- Lamentations of the Flame Princess: Guide to Adventure Writing
- Grognardia: Locale and Plot
- Playing D&D With Porn Stars: How Much Do You Want To Be A Wizard?
- Sham’s Grog ‘n’ Blog: OD&D Cover to Cover
- Sham’s Grog ‘n’ Blog: The Empty Room Principle
- Cyclopeatron: Simple Multi-Ability Checks in Classic D&D
- Check For Traps – Foundations of Gamemastering
- Check For Traps – Judging the Game
- Check For Traps – It’s Not Your Story
- Check For Traps – The Gamemaster As Satan
- Check For Traps – Adversaries Are Made of People
- Check For Traps – Managing Problems and Players
- Check For Traps – How to Host an RPG Session
- Check For Traps – Violence and Viscera
- Tales of the Rambling Bumblers: Sandbox Play
- Tales of the Rambling Bumblers: Welcome to the Jungle!
- Jeffs Gameblog: Triple Secret Random Dungeon Fate Chart of Very Probable Doom
- B/X Blackrazor A to Z Series: Making your Campaign Kick Ass
- “The Oat-Bran Rule”: Inter-player social skills
- Grognardia: Picaro and the ‘Story’ of D&D argues D&D is a picaresque
- Check For Traps – The Challenge of Campaigning
- Character-Based Sandbox Campaigns
- Playing D&D With Porn Stars: Conan Knew More About Cimmeria than Howard Did
- At the Beginning
- Treasure Hunters HQ: What To Do When you Referee – Session (-1): Things for to think about and communicate to the players and yourself as GM BEFORE the game even starts!
- Jeffs Gameblog: Old Schoolin’: How To Get Started
- Jeff’s Gameblog: 20 Quick questions for your Campaign Setting
- Grand Experiments: West Marches, how to run a game for a changing cast of players
- World-Building
- Mazirian’s Garden: World Building and Old School Games: Explains how you can engage in snowflake worldbuilding consistent with running an old school style, challenge based, open world game
- Questions to Ask Yourself After a Session | Papers and Pencils
- Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque: World-Building: When is Enough Too Much?: Nobody wants to read more than the bare basics.
- “Top Down, Zoom In” approach to world-building
- Check For Traps: Putting Your World in Motion discusses adding event triggers and NPCs to your world
- Jeffs Gameblog: Make your own List of Kings
- Town name generator: A stand-alone Perl script that is simple enough to be easy to adapt to your campaign. Based on syllables.
- Religion
- THE LAST DAY DAWNED: That Old Time Religion Part 2: Cults: Guidance on homebrew Cults.
- THE LAST DAY DAWNED: That Old Time Religion (Part 1: Movement): Advice on creating religions
- Random God Generator, or Who Dat God?
- Mazirian’s Garden: Dreams and Reality: Recursive dreaming.
- Qadhi, He Who Felled the First Tree: God of death and healing
- Dungeons and Digressions: The Mysteries of a Religious Order
- Old School Psionics: God embedded in the natural world
- Caffeine Symposium: Religion in D&D
- Apotheosis of the Invisible City – Starting From Scratch: Faith Manages
- Vaults of Nagoh: Memestorms and Ideocults
- General Resources
- 2D6 + 19-Hex Power Flower | Goblin’s Henchman: Interesting method for random-ish tables using Hexes.
- Dungeons & Dutch Ovens: An Exercise in Improvisation, Procedural Generation, and Small Scale Adventuring
- M. A. Packer 1001 Fantasy Adventures
- Lies I Love To Believe: Tarot Card Sandbox Toys
- B-X Quick Reference Sheet – Infinite Dragons
- Abulafia Random Generators: Abulafia is a collection of user-contributed random generators housed within a special kind of wiki. That means you can use the pages here to get interesting random names, treasure, plots, and anything else you need.
- Blessings of the Dice Gods: Dungeon Dozen Fan Index: An index to another blog with a gazillion inspirational, random tables.
- Adventures Wiki is a collection of links to old school adventures in the blogosphere
- Choose a Scenario (Setting!)
- Elfmaids & Octopi: d100 low level village mysteries or Goat Quest Missions
- Goblin Punch: Bardic Services
- Roles, Rules, and Rolls: genres: Simple 3d20 tables for various inspiration on various genres. Be sure to click “older posts” to get all of them!
- Playing D&D With Porn Stars: 100 Problem & Puzzle Set-ups: one-liners to help you make weird and puzzling stuff
- Men & Magic of Middle Earth | Original D&D Discussion
- Playing D&D With Porn Stars: The One True Table, First Draft + Reader Participation
- Jeff’s Gameblog: Epic Sandboxery