Referee’s Guide

This section is specifically for referees to learn how to run a game of Adventure Master.

OSR Principles: Player Goals and Guidelines

In Old School Revival (OSR) games, players are active participants, responsible for driving the narrative through their character’s actions and decisions within a dangerous, responsive world. These principles outline what players should aim to do and how to best engage with the game.

Player Goals: What You Should Be Doing

Your primary role as an OSR player is to actively engage with the game world and contribute to the emerging story.

  • Describe Your Character’s Behavior: Don’t just state mechanical actions. Relay your character’s actions, speech, and feelings to the other players and the GM. This brings your character to life and clarifies your intentions.
    • Example: Instead of “I attack the goblin,” say “My fighter, grimacing at its stench, raises his shield and lunges at the nearest goblin, yelling a challenge!”
  • Explore the Game World: Actively ask questions and interact with the environment. The world is a sandbox, and discovery is key.
    • Example: “What does the door look like? Are there any strange smells in this room? Does the merchant seem trustworthy?”
  • Take Risks and Make Choices: Embrace the inherent danger. Be prepared to take calculated risks, complete challenging goals, and critically choose your battles. Knowing when to fight or flee is paramount for survival.
    • Example: Deciding whether to push deeper into a dark, monster-infested dungeon for more treasure or retreat with what you’ve found and live to fight another day.
  • Seek Opportunities: Actively look for ways to spark adventure. Pursue anything that seems interesting, lucrative, or important in the game world. This includes seeking treasure, power, and glory.
    • Example: Hearing rumors of a hidden ruin, investigating a strange local cult, or tracking down the source of a valuable artifact.
  • Ask for Suggestions: If you’re unsure what your character should do next, don’t hesitate to ask for suggestions from the GM or other players. This can help you find new avenues for action.
  • Encourage Other Players: When another player’s character is in the spotlight, be supportive and engaged. Encourage their decisions and contributions.
  • Develop Your Character: Work to advance your character over time. This means making them more powerful through gained experience and treasure, fostering deeper connections to their world through their actions, and ultimately making them more fun to play as their story unfolds.

Player Guidelines: How to Engage Effectively

These best practices will help you achieve your player goals and contribute to a fantastic OSR experience for everyone.

  • Imagine with a Medieval Fantasy Lens: When considering your character’s actions and understanding the world, default to a medieval fantasy perspective. This helps maintain consistency with the genre’s typical setting and technological level.
  • Portray Capable, Daring, but Believable Characters: Your character should be capable and daring within the fiction, ready to face challenges. However, stay believable within the game’s context. PCs aren’t typically starting as superheroes with boundless power; special abilities are usually earned and hard-won.
    • Example: Your character might bravely charge into a group of weaker enemies, but wouldn’t effortlessly leap over a massive chasm without a magical item or significant planning.
  • Focus on “The Fiction”: Prioritize what’s going on in the game world and what the characters are doing within that imagined reality. The rules and dice exist to support and resolve the fiction, not to dictate it.
    • Example: Instead of thinking, “What skill do I roll?”, think, “What would my character do in this situation?” The roll comes after the fictional action.
  • Support and Contribute: Be actively involved. Support the contributions of other players by building on their ideas, and don’t be shy in offering your own. Work together to solve problems and create interesting scenarios.
  • Cooperate with Fellow Players (Not Necessarily PCs): It’s essential to cooperate as players to keep the game fun and moving, even if your characters (PCs) are squabbling or have internal conflicts. Keep out-of-character interactions civil and positive.
    • Example: Your character might argue with another PC about who gets a share of the treasure, but as players, you’re both working to resolve the situation in a way that contributes to the game.
  • Share the Spotlight: Enjoy your time when your character is the focus of attention, but also be mindful of others. Let the spotlight move around the table, giving everyone a chance to shine.
  • Hold Lightly to Your Characters: This is a crucial mindset. OSR games are deadly, so understand that your characters are mortal. Be prepared for them to die or suffer severe setbacks. This acceptance allows for bolder risks and makes survival feel more meaningful.
  • Respect the Game: Show respect for the shared experience. Pay attention and stay engaged when others are speaking or when the GM is describing the world. Set aside distractions like phones or other activities. This creates a better atmosphere for everyone at the table.

Asking Questions and Exploring the Game World

Think of the GM as your character’s senses. To explore the game world, you need to actively ask questions that probe its details and reveal opportunities. Don’t wait for the GM to tell you everything; ask to learn more.

  • Sensory Input: Engage all your character’s senses to gather information.
    • “Can I see anything unusual down the corridor? Are there any lights or shadows?”
    • “What do I hear if I put my ear to the door? Are there muffled voices, scraping, or silence?”
    • “What does it smell like in here? Is there damp earth, stale air, or something acrid?”
    • “What does that strange liquid taste like?” (Though be prepared for consequences!)
  • Leveraging Knowledge: Determine what your character already knows or can deduce.
    • “Does my character, being a seasoned dungeon delver, know anything about these markings on the wall?”
    • “How can I learn more about this ancient ruin? Are there any libraries in town, or wise hermits?”
  • Investigating Details: Focus on specific elements and potential dangers.
    • “Can I identify how these arcane runes were made? Do they seem recent or ancient? Can I read them or understand their purpose?”
    • “Can I search for traps around this chest, or on the floor ahead?”
    • “Based on the dust and cobwebs, can I infer if there has been recent activity in this area?”
  • Engaging with Creatures: When encountering life, try to understand or interact with it.
    • “Do I recognize this creature from any of the bestiaries I’ve studied?”
    • “Can I try to communicate with it, perhaps through gestures or a known language?”

Portraying Your PC: Bringing Your Character to Life

After the GM describes a situation, it’s your turn to imagine yourself in your character’s shoes and decide how they react. This active portrayal drives the narrative forward.

  • Dialogue and Intent: Decide if your character speaks, and if so, what they say. Speak on behalf of your character, making their intentions clear.
    • “I’ll step forward and loudly demand, ‘Who goes there?!’”
    • “I’ll try to discreetly whisper to the rogue, ‘Stay alert, this feels like a trap.’”
  • Actions and Movement: Describe what your character does. This includes physical actions, manipulating objects, or using items. Be specific about your intentions.
    • “I’ll cautiously move to the right side of the corridor, keeping my shield raised.”
    • “I’ll use my crowbar to try and pry open the jammed portcullis.”
    • “I’ll draw my torch and light it, holding it high to illuminate the cavern.”
  • Internal Monologue and Feelings: Consider your character’s thoughts and feelings. While not always spoken aloud, these internal elements inform your character’s decisions and add depth.
    • “My character is thinking this is a fool’s errand, but the promise of gold outweighs his fear.”
    • “Despite the danger, a surge of excitement runs through him; this is what he lives for.”
  • Relationships and Beliefs: Reflect on your character’s relationships with other PCs and their core beliefs.
    • “How does my character feel about the wizard, who always seems to rush into danger?”
    • “What questions do I have about my character’s personal code, or what they might do if faced with a moral dilemma in the future?”
    • “Is there something about my character’s background or personality I can share with the group or the GM to enrich the scene?”

By actively asking questions and vividly portraying your character’s actions and internal state, you become a vital force in shaping the emergent story of your OSR campaign.

OSR Principles: Player Risks and Rewards

Old School Revival (OSR) games ask players to engage with the game world in a highly interactive and clever way. These principles guide players on how to navigate challenging environments, make meaningful decisions, and thrive (or fail spectacularly) in a dangerous, emergent world.

Learn When To Run

OSR adventures are often intentionally deadly, featuring encounters where the odds are heavily stacked against the player characters (PCs). Unlike many modern RPGs that emphasize “balanced” encounters meant for direct confrontation, OSR expects players to recognize when discretion is the better part of valor.

  • Read the Fiction for Power Levels: Learn to dig into the narrative details provided by the GM to assess the relative power of what your characters are facing. Look for clues about an enemy’s strength, numbers, or environmental advantages.
    • Example: If the GM describes a monster as “towering,” “ancient,” or “surrounded by a dozen smaller, snarling beasts,” those are clear signs that a head-on fight might be suicidal.
  • Don’t Be Afraid to Retreat: The ability to cut your losses and run is a crucial survival skill. A strategic retreat, even if it means leaving treasure behind or abandoning a short-term goal, is a valid and often necessary tactic. A party that successfully disengages, even dragging a wounded comrade, can seek healing and return later, rather than meeting a definitive end in a monster’s maw.

Combat As War, Not Sport

Combat in OSR is a serious, often brutal affair, not a balanced arena where victory is assumed. Players should approach it with the gravity of real-world conflict.

  • No “Balanced” Encounters: Do not expect fights to be designed for fair play. You will encounter foes far stronger or more numerous. This forces a mindset of trepidation and thorough preparation.
  • Think Beyond the Fight: Combat encounters are not self-contained. You’re encouraged to think outside the immediate combat area, outside the dungeon, and beyond conventional tactics. Think like a military strategist (e.g., Sun Tzu): use the environment, lure enemies into traps, employ hit-and-run tactics, or avoid the fight altogether.
    • Example: Instead of just rolling dice against a group of bandits, consider: Can we collapse the tunnel behind them? Can we use the unstable ceiling to our advantage? Can we set a fire to create a smokescreen? Can we split them up? Think laterally or die.

Don’t Be Limited By Your Character Sheet

Your character sheet in OSR is a tool, not a cage. It defines your core abilities, but it doesn’t limit your actions or solutions.

  • Fiction Drives Mechanics: Rules and mechanics are only triggered by what genuinely happens in the conversational fiction of play. To attempt an action, you must describe your character doing it in the game world. The GM will then tell you if a dice roll is needed to resolve the outcome.
    • Example: Instead of saying “I use my ‘Lockpick’ skill on the door,” you’d say, “My character pulls out her tools, examines the lock, and tries to feel the tumblers with her pick.” The GM then decides if a roll is required.
  • Investigate Problems, Don’t “Use Skills”: When faced with a problem, don’t immediately look for a “skill” or “ability” on your sheet to apply. Instead, investigate the problem by asking the GM questions about the fiction and describing what your character attempts to do.
    • Example: Faced with a heavy boulder blocking a path, instead of “I use my ‘Strength’ skill on the boulder,” you’d ask, “Is there anything I can use as a lever nearby? Is the ground uneven? Are there any cracks in the boulder?”
  • Low Stats Drive Ingenuity: Don’t worry excessively about having low stats or strictly roleplaying negative traits. Low stats simply mean you’ll need to be more clever, gather more information, and plan more thoroughly to avoid dangerous rolls. Or, if you’re foolhardy, you can accept the risk and look forward to rolling up a new character if things go south!

Live Your Backstory

In OSR, a character’s “story” is forged primarily through their actions and experiences during play, not through extensive pre-written backstories.

  • Experiences Define the Character: Don’t spend excessive time crafting elaborate backstories. The actual experiences your character has during play—the dangers overcome, the treasures found, the allies made, the wounds suffered—will be far more real and meaningful to you and your fellow players.
  • Lower Stakes for Early Death: An early, unexpected death (which is common) won’t sting as much if you haven’t invested hours into a backstory. Conversely, a character who survives, accumulates wealth, and achieves renown will have genuinely earned their tales and accomplishments.

Power Is Earned, Heroism Proven

Unlike many modern RPGs where characters often start as minor heroes, OSR characters begin as relatively humble adventurers.

  • Meager Beginnings: Your character starts with very little power and meager abilities. This low power level at 1st level naturally encourages lateral thinking and creative solutions to get out of trouble, as direct confrontation is often not an option.
  • Life-or-Death Stakes: When your character’s life is genuinely on the line, simply rising to a challenge (or choosing to flee it) carries far more weight and meaning.
  • Heroism Through Action: If you aspire to play a true hero, understand that heroism is proven through your character’s actions within the dangerous world, not by a title or a starting ability. Nobody in the game world will salute you when you first ride into town; you must earn their respect and your heroic reputation through your deeds.

Scrutinize The World

The game world in OSR is rich with details that can be crucial for survival and success. Players must be active observers.

  • Discard Assumptions, Embrace Curiosity: Forget common fantasy tropes from other games or media. Each OSR world is unique, so be curious about the one you’re playing in. Don’t assume you know how a goblin acts or what a magic sword does based on D&D 5e or a video game.
  • Pay Attention and Take Notes: Pay meticulous attention to details provided by the GM—about characters, the environment, social situations, and more. Take notes (physical maps are highly encouraged!). Information is leverage. Those seemingly small details can save your character’s life or unlock a hidden path.
    • Example: The peculiar twitch in a guard’s eye, the subtle smell of ozone in a certain hallway, or the strange discoloration on a dungeon wall could all be vital clues.

Interrogate The Fiction

Treat the game world as a real, physical space that you can interact with directly and logically, going beyond what the rules explicitly state.

  • Engage with Reality: If you were physically in a room with a heavy vase blocking a view, you’d drag it aside. If you wanted to check for a draft, you’d lick a finger. If you wanted to judge a floor’s slope, you’d spill water. Describe these real-world actions your character takes to achieve the desired effect.
    • Example: Instead of “I roll Perception to find traps,” you’d say, “My character carefully shuffles his feet, watching for disturbed dust. He presses gently on floor tiles and listens for clicks.” The GM will then adjudicate the outcome based on your description.
  • Beyond Dice Rolls: Many old school games don’t have specific “skill rolls” for every interaction. Your detailed descriptions of action are how you engage the world. Don’t wait for the GM to ask for a roll; initiate action by describing what your character does.

The Only Dead End Is Death

In OSR, apparent impasses are usually just invitations to think more creatively. Giving up is a choice, not an inevitability.

  • Change Tactics After Failure: When your first attempt to solve a problem fails, change tactics. A “dead-end hallway” might hide a secret door; a “gargantuan monstrosity” might be bypassable or even open to negotiation.
  • Leverage and Alternatives: That “recalcitrant noble” might have a weakness someone knows about. That “uncrackable iron door” might yield to an unidentified potion, or a cleverly used spell. OSR games present many hard “blockers,” but they encourage players to dig deeper into the fiction and engage with the world as real, often opening new and unexpected avenues for solutions.
    • Example: A locked door you can’t pick might be breakable with a crowbar, bypassable via a hidden tunnel, or solvable by finding a key held by a monster. The immediate failure just means that specific method didn’t work; the problem still exists, awaiting a new approach.

Let Your Creativity Flow

OSR thrives on player ingenuity, often rewarding cleverness that goes beyond what’s written on a character sheet.

  • Recognize Your Unique Strengths: Understand what unique things your character’s class and/or race can do that others can’t. Learn to recognize when it’s your turn to shine and when to let another party member take the lead. When it’s your moment, really go for it.
  • Beyond Mechanics: Don’t limit your thinking to just your character’s mechanics. What are your unique inspirations and ideas as a player?
    • Examples: Do you see a clever, unorthodox use for a magic item? Do you want to try negotiating with a ferocious monster when everyone else expects a fight? Do you spot a weakness in an enemy’s defenses that others might not? Could you combine a few opportunities in a unique way to create an unexpected solution?
  • Embrace the Weird: Open up your brain to the weird and the creative. The game world is often bizarre, and unconventional solutions might just work.

Play To Win, Savor Loss

Success is the goal, but understanding and even appreciating failure is a core part of the OSR experience.

  • Aim for Success: Everyone wants to succeed, and playing with a group that strives for success makes the game more engaging.
  • Embrace Disastrous Outcomes: However, success isn’t guaranteed. Your characters may suffer horrific fates: transformed into frog-people, losing limbs, contracting diseases, being petrified, cursed, entombed, or simply dying from a mundane attack. Learn to appreciate the disgusting, horrifying, shocking, surprising, and even disappointing ways your characters are set back. These losses are part of the story and make victories sweeter.
  • Story Beyond the Character: Remember that through play, a larger story emerges that transcends any single character. Your characters are just participants in this ongoing narrative.
  • Leave Your Mark: Even in failure or death, your character (and your choices as a player) will make a mark on the world. This could be a subtly misleading arrow scratched into a dungeon wall by a dying character, or a crater left where a city once stood due to a catastrophic magical experiment.

Core Concepts for the Referee

OSR gaming emphasizes a distinct style of play that prioritizes player agency, emergent narratives, and a responsive, concrete game world. Here are some key tenets for Referees, often referred to as Game Masters (GMs) or Judges.

Being the Referee

As the Referee in an Old School Revival (OSR) game, you wear several hats, each crucial for creating a smooth, engaging, and challenging play experience. These roles can be broadly categorized into Host & Facilitator, Adjudicator & Judge, and Narrator & Designer.

Host & Facilitator

This role focuses on the practical aspects of running a game session, ensuring a comfortable and welcoming environment for everyone involved.

  • Choose and Prepare the Play Location: It’s typically the GM’s responsibility to select a suitable venue. Prioritize comfort and functionality. A solid table is ideal, providing ample space for dice, notes, and character sheets. GMs generally need a bit more desk space for their own notes and reference materials; a clipboard can be a handy substitute if a large table isn’t available.
    • Venue Considerations: If hosting at home isn’t an option, explore local game stores, libraries, or even some coffee shops and pubs that are tabletop-game friendly. Always be respectful of the venue, its other patrons, and support the business if possible. Be mindful of your group’s noise level and the ambient noise of the venue, as excessive noise can make it difficult to hear and engage with the game.
    • Online Hosting: For remote play, utilize virtual tabletops or voice-chat software to facilitate the session.
  • Logistics and Comfort: Before play begins, clearly communicate basic policies regarding refreshments (e.g., self-serve, shared, or bring your own) and point out the restrooms.
  • Session Management:
    • Material Storage: After each session, decide where to store character sheets, maps, and other game-related worksheets. Many GMs find it useful to keep these between sessions, as players may forget to bring them.
    • Breaks: Remember to incorporate mid-game breaks for restrooms, refreshments, phone calls, or simply a stretch. This helps maintain focus and energy throughout the session.
    • Social Time: Allocate time at the beginning and end of the session for casual chatter. This helps everyone “get in the zone” before the game starts and “decompress” afterwards, fostering a more relaxed atmosphere.
  • Delegate Responsibilities: You don’t have to do everything yourself! Delegate some hosting responsibilities to players, like keeping track of initiative, managing a communal map, or bringing snacks. This not only lightens your load but also encourages player ownership and engagement.

Adjudicator & Judge

In this role, you act as the impartial referee of the game world, managing the rules and making crucial decisions on the fly.

  • Rule Management: Your primary duty is to manage the use of game rules and make calls on situations that arise but aren’t explicitly covered by the rulebook.
    • On-the-Fly Rulings: During play, prioritize the flow of the game. If a rule question arises, do your best to answer it quickly. If you’re unsure or can’t find it immediately, it’s often better to make a quick judgment call based on common sense and the spirit of the game, then move on.
    • Post-Session Clarity: Make a note of any quick rulings. Later, between sessions, take the time to look up the rule (if one exists) or solidify your ruling, providing a more concrete and permanent answer for future consistency.
  • Character Creation Assistance: At the start of a campaign, assist players with character creation. Help them understand the process and offer any relevant thematic advice to ensure their characters fit the group dynamic and the campaign’s tone.
  • Adjudicating Actions: During play, listen carefully to each player’s description of their character’s actions. When a player attempts something that is risky, faces opposition, or involves avoiding danger, you will call for an appropriate ability check or saving throw to determine the outcome. This ensures fair play and mechanical resolution for uncertain actions.

Narrator & Designer

As the GM, you are the players’ primary link to the fictional world. You bring it to life through description and populate it with interactive elements.

  • The Players’ Window: You serve as the players’ window into the fictional world of your creation. Everything they perceive about the game world comes through your descriptions.
  • Information Provider: You narrate all the things happening around the PCs—the sights, sounds, smells, and ambient atmosphere. You are responsible for providing all the information players need to understand their situation, progress, and solve problems.
  • World Builder and Populator: You create, oversee, control, and describe everything the players can interact with. This includes dreaming up:
    • Locations: Dungeons, towns, wilderness areas, specific rooms, and their features.
    • Characters: Non-player characters (NPCs) they can talk to, hire, or befriend, as well as enemies they might fight.
    • Objects & Events: Treasures to find, traps to avoid, and significant events taking place in the world.
  • Detailing and Statting: You’ll constantly be describing all the useful details about the setting and events, ensuring players understand what they’re dealing with and what challenges they face. Where necessary, you’ll assign statistics to characters, monsters, or objects, allowing players to interact with them through the game’s rules.

Portraying the World: A Dangerous, Intimate Medieval Fantasy

Adventure Master aims to create a specific kind of medieval fantasy world – one that is grounded, perilous, and focuses on localized experiences. This isn’t a vast, interconnected, high-fantasy setting where heroes wield immense power from the start. Instead, it’s a world where danger is real, information is scarce, and the extraordinary is truly unique.

  • Localized Culture and Limited Horizons: In this world, people rarely leave their hometown. This means culture is tied to individual towns and cities, rather than broad nations or even species. A dwarf from one mountain clan might have wildly different customs and beliefs than a dwarf from another.
    • Communication is Primitive: The common tongue is spoken, but dialects vary significantly, making communication outside one’s immediate region tricky. Books are rare, often in lost languages, and maps are expensive or crude. Most people, except the wealthy or learned, are illiterate. Messages travel slowly by foot or horseback, making information unreliable and often spread by word-of-mouth. This creates a sense of isolation and mystery about the wider world.
    • Example: News of a king’s death in a faraway capital might take weeks or months to reach a remote village, and by then, the details are likely garbled by rumor.
  • A Gritty Commoner’s Life: Most people lead simple, mundane lives as farmers, fishermen, or laborers. Some learn a specialized trade as an artisan or craftsman, or join the military as a guard. A select few are nobles, providing protection in exchange for absolute authority. The less fortunate are vagrants or beggars. Most townsfolk know each other personally, fostering a close-knit but potentially insular community.
    • Adventurers are Feared: Adventurers, being outsiders and often associated with danger and disruption, are mistrusted and feared until they explicitly prove themselves to be benevolent and helpful to the local populace. They don’t arrive as celebrated heroes.
    • Example: A party entering a new village might find doors shutting and whispers following them until they deal with a local bandit problem or clear out a monster den that’s been harassing the area.
  • Vast and Perilous Wilderness: Civilization is just tiny “pinpoints of light in a sea of darkness.” The wilderness is immense and everywhere. Stepping outside a settlement’s walls means a traveler is entirely on their own.
    • Travel is Hazardous: Bandits, rogue knights, and monsters constantly raid unguarded travelers. Caravans offer some safety but are slow and follow indirect routes. Travel outside large kingdoms means navigating unkempt paths and natural conduits through untamed territory. Camping in the wilderness is highly perilous; stopping at a fort, outpost, or roadside inn is always the preferred, safer option. This reinforces how “small” the world feels when travel is so arduous and dangerous.
    • Limited Geographical Knowledge: Only the areas immediately surrounding settlements are relatively clear. You, as the GM, should hint at a larger world, but only provide specific details for the PCs’ immediate surroundings. Locals will have limited worldviews, relying on conjecture and hearsay for what lies beyond their familiar borders. Well-traveled individuals are rare and notable. This narrowed perspective creates a more intimate and focused game.
  • The Specialness of the Supernatural: A commoner’s life is so mundane that any encounter with the supernatural is a profound, singular event. It’s likely the only thing of its kind they’ll ever see. This means that magical or monstrous threats are incredibly localized and specific.
    • Example: It’s not just “a temple of evil”; to the nearby folk, “it’s THE temple of evil,” the source of all their unique woes. A lone hag in the woods is the hag, not one of many.
  • Magic and Monsters are Real and Terrifying:
    • Persecuted Magic: In some cultures, magic is so threatening it’s illegal, and known magic-users face harsh persecution. This forces most magicians into lives as hermits or into clandestine cults to practice their arts in secret. True masters of magic are incredibly rare due to the sheer danger involved in their pursuit.
    • Mysterious Monsters: Creatures of myth are not just tall tales; they exist, and the terror they instill is very real. How you present these monsters is key to their dramatic tension. Avoid treating them as generic stereotypes. Instead, make them mysterious. Commoners often don’t differentiate between specific types of creatures; they might just call them “the monster” or “the demon” instead of a specific name like “a grick.” This emphasizes their unknown, terrifying nature.

OSR Principles: The GM’s Role

As the Game Master (GM) in an Old School Revival (OSR) game, your role is multifaceted and pivotal. You act as a guide, an impartial judge, and the architect of a living world. These responsibilities are divided into overarching GM Goals and practical GM Guidelines for effective play.

GM Goals: What You Should Always Be Doing

These are the fundamental aims you should strive for when running an OSR game, focusing on facilitating engaging gameplay and a responsive world.

  • Lead the Conversation: You’re the primary conductor of the game’s flow. Guide players through the narrative and ensure everyone gets a fair chance to speak and contribute.
  • Guide the Players: Help players navigate the rules and their character sheets. Answer questions about game mechanics, clarify their options for moving forward, and hint at where exciting opportunities or vital information might lie. You’re there to enable their agency, not dictate their path.
  • Keep Them Informed: As the eyes and ears of the player characters (PCs), it’s your job to ensure players know everything they reasonably would within the fiction. Provide sufficient descriptive detail for them to visualize the situation and make informed decisions.
  • Adjudicate the Rules: You are the ultimate authority on how the rules apply. This involves deciding when to call for ability checks, how much damage is dealt, how long conditions last, the risk level of an action, or how much research is needed. If a situation isn’t covered by the rules, use your best judgment in the moment and strive for consistency in future rulings.
  • Take Notes: During play, meticulously record important details: names, locations, major events, ongoing conditions, and status effects. After each session, review these notes, ask yourself questions about the implications, and build upon established facts to evolve the world.
  • Track Time: Make calls about how much time passes for various actions and let players know when significant time has elapsed. Keep track of the flow of time in-game, but don’t overcomplicate it – keep it simple and loose. This often informs resource management and the likelihood of random encounters.
  • Draw Maps: Sketch out key locations and note the positions of important elements during play. This visual aid helps players understand the scene and their tactical situation. Between sessions, expand on these maps, filling in gaps and considering what might populate previously blank areas.

GM Guidelines: Best Practices

These principles offer practical advice on how to embody the GM goals, fostering a dynamic, challenging, and player-driven game.

  • Manage the Spotlight: When engaging with a player, give them your full attention. However, consciously move the “spotlight” to different players to ensure everyone gets a chance to contribute and shine. More than one player can share the spotlight at a time, but keep it moving to maintain engagement.
  • Keep Prep Simple: Avoid over-detailing your preparations for areas, NPCs, monsters, or situations. Concise prep is easier to use and reuse. Superfluous details can bog down gameplay and make it harder to adapt to player choices. Focus on broad strokes and key, gameable elements.
  • Refer to Your Notes: When you’re stumped or need to recall details, check your prep or other notes. Actively reincorporate past details to create a sense of consistency, verisimilitude, and familiarity for the players.
  • Be Fair: You are an impartial mediator and referee, not an adversary trying to defeat the players. Let their decisions genuinely matter and honestly present the consequences of their actions. Avoid favoritism or going easy on them.
  • Be Firm: Deliver your decisions and rulings with confidence. Enforce the rules when necessary, and don’t allow players to push each other or you around. This maintains authority and a consistent game experience.
  • Play to Find Out: Do not pre-write the story. Your role is to create interesting situations, provide clear options, offer opportunities, and hint at possibilities. Design interesting problems, but let the players find the solutions. Be flexible. The true story emerges from player choices, the trouble they encounter, and how they deal with the consequences. Sometimes, even using a player’s guess as the “right” answer can be highly rewarding for them.
  • Keep it Grounded: While magic and monsters exist, balance them with believability within your world’s logic. Show the familiar and mundane aspects of life so that the weird and magical feel genuinely special and impactful when encountered.
  • Bring the Adventure: Actively provide players with opportunities to take heroic risks. Present them with the weird, mysterious, and magical elements that fill the world. Make monsters genuinely scary and mysterious. If players want something, make them adventure for it. Never let players flounder aimlessly; constantly provide mysteries to investigate, NPCs to talk to, questions to answer, and events to engage with.
  • Think Off-screen: Remember that the world continues even beyond the PCs’ immediate perception. Consider what’s happening “off-screen” at any given time. Apply consequences of checks or world events to things the PCs aren’t directly witnessing, and let them discover these impacts later.
  • Be a Fan of the PCs: While you challenge them, cheer for their victories and lament their defeats. Push them, let them suffer consequences, but don’t get bitter if their choices diverge from your expectations. You’re rooting for their story, even if it’s not the one you imagined.
  • Deliver Death with Poise: PC death is an inherent part of OSR. When a character dies, deliver it with grace and purpose. Avoid “pointless” deaths due to misunderstandings or arbitrary rulings. Strive for deaths that are dramatically satisfying, making them feel like a consequence of the player’s choices. Understand that players might be upset initially; allow them to cool off, and often, they’ll be excited to roll a new character. It’s okay to rewind if there was a genuine mistake or confusion.
  • Bring Every Creature to Life: Name all your NPCs (keeping a list handy). Make each monster unique, scary, mysterious, and believable. Remember that all NPCs and monsters have their own motivations and points of view; consider what they want and how they would logically act.
  • Lean on Tropes: Don’t feel pressured to be entirely original. Familiar tropes are excellent touchstones that players can quickly grasp and imagine. Use them as foundations to build upon.
  • Be Ready to Watch it Crumble: When you introduce something into the world, immediately think about how it can be destroyed, killed, or fundamentally changed. Design elements you want players to mess with. Do not protect your creations from player meddling; players are supposed to affect the world. It can be hard to see something you worked on get dismantled, but that’s precisely why you created it—to be a dynamic element for player interaction.

Divest Yourself of Their Fate

As the GM in an OSR game, your role is distinct. You are neither an adversary to the players nor a storyteller dictating their narrative.

  • Be an Impartial World Steward: Your primary job is to portray the game world genuinely and embody its inhabitants authentically. Let the Non-Player Characters (NPCs) and monsters react to the characters’ actions as they logically would, not in a way designed to push a specific plot.
  • Emergent Storytelling: The “story” in an OSR game isn’t something you plan; it’s something that emerges naturally from the characters’ interactions with the world and its inhabitants. Their choices, successes, and failures weave the narrative threads together.
    • Example: You don’t decide “the players will form an alliance with the elves.” Instead, you create a detailed elven settlement with its own problems and personalities. If the players engage with the elves in a way that leads to an alliance, that’s the emergent story. If they insult the elves and get attacked, that’s also an emergent story.
  • Fairness and Transparency: To maintain trust and the inherent danger of the world, be fair and impartial. Avoid fudging dice rolls (secretly changing results) and roll openly whenever possible. This makes the game feel honest and dangerous, reinforcing that the world has objective realities the players must contend with, rather than feeling like the GM is secretly manipulating outcomes. This encourages players to think about the fictional world, not about trying to “game” the GM.

Leave Preparation Flexible

OSR preparation is about creating a sandbox, not a railroad track. The GM designs dynamic situations, not fixed plots.

  • No Pre-Written Plots: Don’t prepare a specific plot for the players to follow. Instead, focus on creating situations that the players can interact with.
  • Extrapolate, Don’t Plan: During the game, observe what players do and extrapolate the consequences of their actions based on your knowledge of the world. Don’t plan too far ahead, as players are famously unpredictable.
    • Example: You know the goblin tribe is running low on food. If the players steal their supplies, you can extrapolate that the goblins will get desperate and likely launch a raid. You didn’t plan for the players to steal; you reacted to their choice.
  • Don’t Over-Prep: Keep your ideas for situations loose and adaptable. Unused prep isn’t wasted; it can always be recycled in later sessions or even entirely different campaigns.
  • Player-Guided Direction: After each session, ask players what they intend to do next. This lets you focus your prep on situations relevant to their stated goals, ensuring the game’s direction is driven by player decisions, not by a GM’s preconceived plot.
  • Toolkits Over Rigid Sourcebooks: Many OSR-aligned products are designed as “toolkits” or flexible frameworks, giving GMs the tools to build a unique world that responds to their players, rather than forcing them into a rigid, pre-dictated narrative.

Build Responsive Situations

A key to emergent gameplay is creating dynamic situations within the world that react to player actions.

  • Actors with Agendas: Design situations with multiple actors or factions, each pursuing their own goals and agendas. These independent motivations create a living, breathing world.
    • Example: Instead of “The evil cult is here,” think “The cult of the Bleeding Hand (seeking a lost artifact) is trying to displace the local bandit gang (trying to maintain their territory) while the town militia (focused on protecting trade routes) is largely unaware of the cult, but growing suspicious of the bandits.”
  • Player Impact and Consequences: Allow players’ actions to genuinely affect this environment. If players intervene, the situation changes. If they don’t intervene, show the situation worsening naturally. This creates stakes and urgency without GM intervention.
    • Example: If the players ignore the cult, the cult succeeds in summoning something terrible. If they help the bandits, the bandits become more powerful. These consequences, good or bad, drive the narrative.
  • Mapping Relationships: A useful technique for GMs is to map out the relationships between elements of a situation (factions, NPCs, locations, problems) and consider how the player characters might intervene. This helps visualize the interconnectedness and potential ripple effects.

Rulings Over Rules

This principle highlights OSR’s often minimalist rule sets. Unlike more modern games with extensive rules for every conceivable situation, OSR games intentionally leave many scenarios to GM discretion. This isn’t a flaw; it’s a feature that promotes flexibility and creative problem-solving.

  • Embrace Openness: Don’t get hung up on finding a specific rule for every action players attempt. OSR encourages players to try “crazy things” and apply their in-game logic. If a player wants to use a bear trap to trip a fleeing goblin, there might not be a specific “bear trap tripping” rule. That’s okay!
  • Make Common-Sense Rulings: When a situation isn’t explicitly covered by the rules, make a quick, fair, and logical ruling based on the spirit of the game, then keep the game moving. It doesn’t need to be perfect in the moment.
    • Example: A player wants to swing from a chandelier to attack a monster. Instead of searching for “chandelier swinging” rules, you might rule, “Okay, that’s a Strength check. If you succeed, you get advantage on your attack; if you fail, you fall and take some damage.”
  • Consistency for Future Play: If you realize a ruling might come up again, make a note of it between sessions. Applying that ruling consistently later helps build player trust and world verisimilitude.

Embrace Chaos…

Randomness is a powerful tool in OSR for making the world feel alive, unpredictable, and objective.

  • Dice as a Muse: Don’t rely solely on your own imagination. The dice introduce capricious, unexpected twists that keep the game fresh for both players and GM. Relying too much on improvisation can lead to predictable patterns or exhaustion for the GM.
  • External Inspiration: Random results and external sources (like random tables) help the GM divest themselves of the players’ fate. When a random monster appears or a random treasure is found, it feels like an objective part of the world, not something the GM specifically chose for the players.
  • Random Tables: Use random tables for encounters, treasure, dungeon dressing, and more. The surprising outcomes can bring an energy and mystery that’s hard to consistently improvise on demand. They help the GM truly portray a world, rather than create a story.

…But Uphold Logic

While embracing chaos, it’s crucial to maintain a sense of internal consistency and realism within the game world.

  • Verisimilitude: Don’t let randomness make the world feel nonsensical. If there’s an obvious choice, consequence, or cause based on the established logic of your world, use it, even if a random roll might suggest otherwise. This helps players make reasonable plans and feel like their strategic thinking is rewarded.
  • Emphasize Surprise: When you do use randomness, its surprising nature is even more impactful because it stands out against a backdrop of logical consistency.
  • Customize Tables: To ensure randomness still fits your setting, consider customizing random tables (e.g., a “forest encounters” table for your specific enchanted forest, or a “treasure type” table that fits the local culture) to give your game a more cohesive feel.

Let Them Off the Rails

This principle is a direct counter to railroading and emphasizes allowing players to truly explore.

  • Transparency (Where Prep Is): It’s often helpful to let players know roughly where your prep exists. For example, “I have this dungeon fully mapped out,” or “I’ve detailed this town and the surrounding wilderness.”
  • Player Choice is Paramount: If you expect players to “zig” (go in one direction) but they “zag” (go somewhere entirely different), do not constrain or re-route them. Let them go where they choose.
  • Filling the Blanks: If players head somewhere you haven’t prepped, lean on your “Three Tiers of Truth” (improvise, use rules, then patch). Use random tables to quickly fill in blanks for immediate play, and then build out more detailed prep for that new area between sessions.
  • Embrace Player Chaos: Find the excitement in the players’ unexpected choices. Their creativity and unpredictable actions are a vital source of fun and emergent narrative, creating a dynamic game experience for everyone, including the GM.

OSR Principles: Ingenuity and Emergence

Old School Revival (OSR) gaming prioritizes player ingenuity and a reactive world over pre-scripted narratives or excessive rules. These principles aim to create a challenging, immersive, and highly rewarding play experience.

XP for Discovery and Adversity

In many OSR games, the primary driver for character advancement, Experience Points (XP), is directly tied to a tangible goal: treasure. This system serves as a powerful incentive for players and a robust control knob for the GM.

  • Treasure as the Main XP Source: XP is often awarded based on the gold piece (GP) value of treasure that characters successfully extract from dangerous locations and return to safety (e.g., town). This isn’t just about accumulating wealth; it’s an abstract way to represent the characters learning and growing from the risks, problem-solving, and sheer adversity involved in acquiring and securing that treasure.
    • Example: A party clears a dungeon of monsters but leaves behind a chest full of coins and a jeweled idol. They earn little to no XP. If they find a hidden cache of 5,000 gp and manage to haul it back to their base, they gain 5,000 XP (or a similar conversion). This encourages deep exploration and resource management.
  • Monsters are Obstacles, Not XP Banks: While defeating monsters might grant some XP, it’s typically much less than the value of the treasure they guard. This design choice discourages players from defaulting to combat as their primary solution. Instead, it incentivizes them to out-think, bypass, or trick monsters to get to the real prize – the treasure.
    • Example: A goblin patrol might be worth 50 XP to defeat in combat, but the hoard they’re guarding could be worth 1,000 GP (and thus 1,000 XP). This makes sneaking past, distracting, or negotiating with the goblins far more appealing than a direct fight.
  • The Game’s Fuel and Control Knob: XP-for-treasure acts as the “fuel of the game’s engine.” Player decisions, from which dungeon to explore to how to approach a challenge, are almost always influenced by the pursuit of valuable loot. As a GM, you can control the rate of PC leveling by adjusting the amount of treasure available in the world. You can also tailor the game’s focus by deciding what counts as “treasure.”
    • Example: If you want a game focused on exploration, make valuable ancient maps or unique geological samples count for XP. For a more social game, maybe successfully acquiring rare books of lore, unique artisanal brewing ingredients for a local guild, or even “crystallized memories” (a magical resource) could yield XP, aligning the game’s rewards with the desired play style.

Player Ingenuity Over Character Ability

In OSR, player skill and creative problem-solving are paramount, often superseding what’s written on a character sheet.

  • Minimalist Character Sheets: Old school PCs are often quite minimalistic in their rules and abilities. This isn’t a lack of detail; it’s intentional. The character sheet primarily exists to cover situations where players make a mistake (e.g., fail a saving throw, get hit in combat).
  • Solve Problems with Your Brain, Not Dice: Players aren’t meant to solve problems by simply rolling a specific “skill” or “feat.” Instead, they are challenged to use their own cleverness, logic, and imagination to navigate obstacles. Present problems that don’t rely on obscure, out-of-character knowledge and have no single, easy solution, but rather many difficult (and thus interesting) solutions.
    • Example: Instead of “Roll Dexterity (Acrobatics) to cross the crocodile moat,” the GM describes the moat, the crocodiles, maybe some nearby loose logs, a crumbling bridge. The problem is “Cross the moat.” The solution is up to the players to devise, using the tools and information available in the fiction.
    • More Examples: “A door in a deep dungeon only opens in sunlight” – how do you get sunlight down there? “A key in a lake of acid” – how do you retrieve it without dissolving? These are environmental puzzles designed for player thought.

Cleverness Rewarded, Not Thwarted

The GM’s role is to encourage and reward player creativity, allowing their ingenious solutions to manifest in the game world.

  • Generosity with Creative Solutions: Be open and generous when players propose clever solutions, as long as they are within the realm of possibility within the fictional world. Don’t be afraid to say “yes, and…”
  • Checks for Risk, Not Prohibition: If a creative action is inherently risky or difficult, call for a saving throw or an ability check to determine its success and consequences. But only outright forbid a creative solution if it’s genuinely impossible within the game’s established logic (e.g., a character can’t fly without a spell or magic item).
    • Example: A player suggests, “Can I tie a rope to a heavy piece of dungeon debris, use it as a pendulum, and swing across the chasm?” Instead of just saying no or demanding a specific skill roll, you might say, “That’s risky. Make a Strength check to see if you manage to secure the rope properly, and a Dexterity save to stick the landing on the other side.”
  • Encourage the Mentality: If players are accustomed to simply rolling skills, present them with situations that are nearly impossible to tackle head-on with brute force. Then, strongly reward even slightly creative solutions. One of your key goals as a GM is to foster this “player ingenuity” mentality. It’s perfectly fine to explicitly tell your players, “In this game, cleverness will get you farther than brute force.”
  • Grant Mechanical Advantage: When players go to effort to gain an upper hand in the fiction through cleverness, give them the benefit of the doubt and translate their ingenuity into concrete mechanical advantages.
    • Example: If players cleverly rig a trap that drops a net on a monster, they might get advantage on their attack rolls against the entangled foe, or the monster might be surprised for the first round of combat, even if the rules don’t explicitly detail “net traps.”

Ask Them How They Do It

This principle reinforces the focus on player action and detailed fictional engagement.

  • Interrogate the Fiction “Manually”: Encourage players to describe how their characters interact with the environment, rather than just stating an outcome or calling for a roll. Make them describe the process.
    • Example: Instead of “I search for secret doors,” ask, “Okay, how are you searching? Are you feeling along the walls? Pressing bricks? Looking for drafts?” This makes the player commit to their character’s actions.
  • Rolls as a Last Resort: You can always grant a roll for discovery or insight if the player eventually gives up on describing their detailed actions, but push for the detailed interaction first. This puts the onus on the player to describe their character’s engagement with the world.

Let Them Manipulate The World

To make creative problem-solving truly appealing, GMs should design worlds that are inherently interactive and offer opportunities for players to exert their will.

  • Provide Tools for Interaction: Give players elements within the world that they can bend to their will. This means designing situations with malleable components.
    • Example: Instead of a static dungeon, include rival factions that players can pit against each other. Provide potions with weirdly specific effects that might seem useless at first but become powerful when combined creatively. Design items that can be combined or repurposed (e.g., a mundane bucket that can be filled with oil and set alight). Create dungeons with shortcuts, back passages, and environmental hazards that can be turned against enemies.
  • Focus on Creative Problem Solving: The game should provide diverse tools and situations that make players want to find non-combat solutions, making brute force less appealing or even impossible.

Good Items Are Unique Tools

Magic items in OSR are often less about numerical bonuses and more about providing unique, situational utility.

  • Specific, Clever Utility: A truly good magic item doesn’t just increase damage or ability scores; it performs an odd, very specific thing that becomes powerful only when used cleverly by the player. This transforms problems into puzzles.
    • Example: Instead of just a “+1 sword,” consider: “A rope that becomes as rigid as steel on command.” This doesn’t make you hit harder, but it could bridge a chasm, block a door, or create a makeshift weapon.
    • More Examples: “A coin that lands on any result you wish when flipped” (great for influencing coin tosses, but limited use in combat). “A bell that produces silence” (useless for direct damage, invaluable for stealth or silencing spellcasters).
  • Balance with Downsides: To prevent magic items from trivializing every challenge, consider giving them a downside, an interesting cost, or a chance to deplete with each use. This adds strategic depth and resource management.
    • Example: The “rigid rope” might only work for 1d4 turns per day. The “silence bell” might attract incorporeal spirits when rung.

Don’t Mind The Fourth Wall

OSR encourages a pragmatic approach to “metagaming,” prioritizing player ingenuity over rigid character personification.

  • Favor Player Ingenuity: Don’t get overly concerned about the “dissonance” between what the player knows and what their character knows (“metagaming”). The game actively favors and rewards the player’s cleverness and problem-solving abilities, even if it comes from an out-of-character perspective.
  • Focus on Engagement: The goal is to keep the game engaging and challenging. If a player, through their own cleverness, comes up with a brilliant plan that their character might not have logically conceived, embrace it. The excitement of the player solving the problem outweighs strict adherence to “what the character would do.” This allows players to truly participate and feel the thrill of overcoming obstacles with their own wit.

OSR Principles: Challenges and Agency

These principles guide GMs in creating a dynamic and challenging game world where players are constantly making tough choices, engaging their ingenuity, and being surprised by the unique twists of the adventure.

Offer Tough Choices

OSR games are built on a foundation of meaningful decisions, often forcing players to weigh significant risk versus reward. This creates constant tension and encourages strategic thinking beyond simple combat.

  • Escalating Peril: The further players venture into the wilderness or deeper into a dungeon, the more dangerous things should become. This escalating peril can stem from dwindling resources (food, health, equipment, light) or increasing threats from the environment or inhabitants. This forces players to continually ask themselves: “Is it worth pushing our luck just a little bit farther, or should we retreat?” The most valuable treasures are, by design, the hardest and riskiest to reach.
    • Example: Players are deep in a dungeon, low on torches and healing potions. They find a faint, unsettling sound coming from a passage that seems to lead to a vault. Do they press on, risking a deadly encounter in the dark, or do they retreat with what they’ve found so far?
  • Combat as a Critical Decision Point: In combat, low character health is intentional. It’s designed to make fights quick and push players towards a crucial decision: “Should I retreat to fight another day, or risk it all to finish them now?” This moment of high-stakes choice is central to the thrill of combat in OSR.
    • Example: The party’s fighter is at 3 HP, facing two goblins. They could try to finish them off, or the fighter could disengage and try to escape while the wizard casts a distracting spell. The immediate threat makes every decision weighty.
  • Encourage Unorthodox Solutions: Actively look for situations where all obvious choices come with a heavy cost. These dilemmas push players away from brute force and towards creative, lateral thinking.
    • Example: A heavily guarded bridge is the only direct way across a chasm. Directly attacking is suicidal. The heavy cost of this obvious option forces players to think about other solutions, like finding a hidden cave system, negotiating with a neutral faction, or rigging a distraction.

Build Challenges With Multiple Answers…

A well-designed OSR challenge should rarely have only one solution, ensuring players always have options and can pursue paths that fit their approach.

  • Avoid Chokepoints: Don’t design scenarios with a single “chokepoint” that players must overcome to progress. Instead, provide multiple, obvious alternatives, each with different levels of difficulty or types of challenges.
    • Example: If players need to get past a magically locked iron gate, don’t just put the key in an NPC’s pocket. Offer alternatives:
      • An NPC has a key (requires diplomacy, theft, or combat).
      • There’s a hidden “Potion of Eat Metal” in a nearby, dangerous room (requires exploration and combat/stealth).
      • A lesser-known arcane ritual could temporarily dispel the lock, but it requires rare components (requires research and a side quest).
      • Perhaps a powerful earth elemental nearby could be convinced or coerced to smash it (requires high-level interaction or a risky pact).
  • Seed Solutions: When you design adventures, deliberately seed them with challenges where you know the answers. These solutions might leverage a core player character capability or be hidden elsewhere in the adventure for them to discover.
  • Encourage Exploration: These multi-solution challenges encourage players to “dig into the fiction” and explore. If a challenge is absolutely critical for the adventure to continue, it’s wise to place at least a few solutions (three is a good number) to ensure players don’t get stuck.

…And Challenges With No Answer

While having pre-planned solutions is good for key challenges, occasionally introducing problems without a clear GM-designed answer can lead to incredibly rewarding, player-driven moments.

  • Trust Your Players: Present players with problems where you, the GM, genuinely don’t know the answer. Trust that their combined ingenuity will surprise you and find solutions you hadn’t anticipated. These are often the most memorable and rewarding challenges for everyone at the table.
    • Example: “The deeps of the dungeon are stalked by a living maelstrom of ravenous psychic energy. If the players want to reach the Golden Falcon, they’ll have to get past it, but I have no idea how they’ll manage that.”
  • Force Radical Creativity: These challenges exist to push players to be creative in ways that surprise everyone, forcing truly outside-the-box thinking.
  • Strategic Placement: Be cautious about placing “no-answer” challenges at critical chokepoints in your adventure, unless your intention is for players to retreat and return later with a better plan or new resources. However, sprinkling them throughout the game can lead to unexpected and exciting turns.

Subvert Their Expectations

Players, especially those familiar with fantasy tropes, will bring preconceived notions from pop culture. Use this to your advantage.

  • Inject Unique Twists: Take common monsters, locations, or situations and infuse them with your own unique twists or differences. This encourages players to look beyond their assumptions.
    • Example: Instead of just a standard goblin lair, perhaps these goblins worship a sentient fungus and have developed symbiotic relationships with giant mushrooms. Instead of a classic haunted house, maybe the ghosts are benevolent but only communicate through unsettling poltergeist activity that drives people away from a hidden truth.
  • Encourage Exploration and Problem-Solving: By introducing these unique elements, you incentivize players to explore these differences rather than relying on prior knowledge. They are forced to solve new problems they aren’t familiar with, leading to genuine discovery and engagement with your specific game world.

OSR Principles: Danger, Decisions, and Death

These principles highlight that Old School Revival games are designed to be dangerous, but they also provide players with the tools and information to navigate those dangers through cleverness and calculated risks.

Deadly But Avoidable Combat

Combat in OSR games is rarely a balanced, fair fight. Player Characters (PCs) will often face foes far more powerful or numerous than themselves. This isn’t meant to be unfair; it’s a feature designed to push players toward intelligent, tactical approaches.

  • Treat Combat as Warfare: Players should learn to approach combat like real-world warfare. Direct, head-on assaults are often suicidal. Instead, encourage and reward ingenuity, thorough preparation, and underhanded tactics to rig the odds in their favor. The goal is to outsmart and out-plan enemies for survival.
    • Example: Faced with a stronger goblin patrol, players might set up an ambush, dig a pit trap, create a diversion, or try to lure the goblins into a more favorable environment rather than charging straight in.
  • Dungeons as Tactical Arenas: OSR dungeons aren’t designed to be “cleared” room by room. Their confined spaces and interconnected areas are meant to constrain and focus possible actions. This makes it easier for both players and the GM to analyze and plan around problems. Deadly combat is a common problem, specifically designed to be solved through a variety of methods other than direct confrontation.
    • Example: A room with a fearsome Ogre isn’t meant for a stand-up fight if the party is weak. Instead, the dungeon might offer ways to seal the Ogre in, bypass its room through a secret passage, trick it into a pre-set trap, or use the environment (like a precarious bridge) to their advantage.

Keep Up The Pressure

Maintaining a sense of urgency and resource scarcity is key to the OSR experience. This constant pressure encourages difficult choices and keeps players engaged.

  • The Clock is Ticking: Whether through random encounter rolls that trigger as time passes, a dungeon slowly filling with sand or water, or a character dying from poison in a fixed number of turns, keep players on a metaphorical “clock.” This creates a tension between their desire to explore and loot versus the terror of lingering too long and facing escalating danger.
    • Example: The GM rolls for wandering monsters every few turns in the dungeon. This means lingering to search every corner increases the risk of another costly fight or using up precious resources like light and healing.
  • Consequences for Repeated Attempts: If players repeatedly attempt a challenge that has a finite chance of success, like a lock-picking check, introduce a consequence for failure beyond just not succeeding. This might be a chance for a wandering monster, attracting attention, or breaking a tool.
  • Allow for Breathers (But Still Consider Trouble): It’s important to allow players moments to “breathe” and recover, such as when they return to town, during long journeys through the wilderness, or if they find a truly safe room within a dungeon. However, always consider a chance for trouble in these “safe” periods too, even if it’s a 1-in-6 chance per hour, day, or week. This maintains the world’s inherent unpredictability.

Let The Dice Kill Them…

Character death is a real and expected part of OSR games. The GM is not there to protect characters; their survival is entirely up to the players’ decisions and the dice.

  • GM as Referee, Not Protector: Remember, the GM is an impartial referee, not an antagonist or a protector. If the rules and the dice say a character is dead, they are dead. Shielding PCs from death often leads to games lacking genuine tension, and players who only resort to brute force because they know there are no real consequences.
  • Weight to Risks and Rewards: Unambiguous character death gives significant weight to both the risks and rewards of play. Every choice, every tactic, every dice roll feels more impactful when character life is on the line.
  • Simple Character Creation: Character creation in OSR games is typically simple and quick for a reason. This makes character death less punishing in terms of time investment. Furthermore, the presence of hirelings or retainers often provides players with immediate replacement characters or backup options.
  • Attachment Through Experience: Don’t worry that players won’t feel attached to “simple” characters. They absolutely will. Attachment grows not from complex backstories, but from the shared experiences, dangers overcome, and stakes achieved. When a character has faced real perils and accumulated treasure, the player gains “something to lose,” making their survival all the more meaningful.

…But Telegraph Lethality

While character death is real, it should rarely feel arbitrary or like “random chance.” Players should have information to make informed choices.

  • Give Warnings: Provide players with chances to think their way around threats and obstacles by telegraphing them ahead of time. This doesn’t mean explicitly telling them, “This monster is too strong for you,” but rather giving them clues.
    • Example: A powerful monster might be heard roaring from a distance, its lair might be littered with the bones of previous, well-armed adventurers, or an NPC might offer a dire warning about its capabilities.
  • Death is Player’s Fault (or Understood): When a PC dies, it should ideally be because of a player’s miscalculation, a poor decision, or a failed gamble, not an unseen trap or an enemy that appeared without any warning. Players should understand why their character died. This reinforces agency and learning from mistakes.
    • Example: If a party charges a dragon without reconnaissance, and it wipes them out, that’s their fault. If a giant spider drops from the ceiling without any clue or hint of its presence, and kills a PC instantly, that feels unfair. The GM should have telegraphed the spider’s presence (e.g., webs, chittering sounds, disturbed dust).

OSR Principles: A Dynamic and Responsive World

These OSR principles guide GMs in revealing the game world’s true state, encouraging player engagement, and ensuring the world reacts logically to their actions.

Reveal The Situation

For players to make informed and meaningful decisions, they need access to information. The GM’s role is to present the game world clearly, assuming common sense on the part of the characters.

  • Don’t Hide Important Information: If a PC could reasonably know something, tell the player directly and immediately. The game thrives on decision-making, and good decisions require good information.
    • Example: If a monster smells strongly of sulfur, say so. If a guard looks nervous, describe their fidgeting. Don’t force players to roll for “common sense” observations.
  • Logical World Building: When preparing, approach populations and challenges with real-world logic, rather than trying to create a perfectly “balanced” sequence of fights. Players will naturally probe your descriptions for valuable information about this logical world.
    • Example: Instead of just “3 goblins,” describe them: “Three gaunt goblins, their leather armor scuffed and their spears chipped, huddle around a meager fire, looking anxious.” This signals their state and potential desperation.
  • Assume Common Sense & Telegraph Danger: Always assume characters possess common sense. If a danger is obvious, mention it clearly. Avoid situations where a character suffers solely because a player misunderstood a description or missed an implicit threat.
    • Example: If a player says they “hop down” a cliff, and it’s actually a 50-foot drop, clarify: “You mean, you want to hop down this fifty-foot cliff? That would be quite dangerous.” This ensures the player understands the consequences before committing.

Give Them Layers To Peel

The game world shouldn’t reveal all its secrets at once. Instead, it should have layers of information that players can gradually uncover through observation, investigation, and interaction.

  • Progressive Revelation: Design locations and encounters with different tiers of visibility:
    • Obvious: What’s immediately noticeable at first glance.
    • Subtle: What requires a closer look or a moment of reflection.
    • Hidden: What requires active searching, a skill check, or solving a puzzle.
    • Invisible: What requires specific magic or unique abilities to detect.
    • Secret: What requires special information to find or interact with.
  • Player-Driven Information Gathering: Create these layers and then consider how players would go about extracting that information.
    • Example: A room might at first glance appear to be just a collapsed storeroom (obvious). On closer inspection, a faint, sweet smell suggests something else (subtle). After searching, a loose flagstone reveals a hidden cavity (hidden). Perhaps only detect magic would reveal the magical sigil etched on the cavity’s underside (invisible). Activating the sigil might require
  • Don’t “Blurt Out Secrets”: When describing a room or situation, avoid presenting all information as a bulleted list of contents. Instead, weave information into natural descriptions and allow player action to trigger deeper revelations. Some adventure modules explicitly guide GMs on what’s “obvious” vs. “hidden” for this reason.

Don’t Bury The Lead

Every detail you provide about the world should ideally be “gameable”—meaning players can potentially act on that information. Avoid purely descriptive fluff unless it serves a purpose.

  • Actionable Details: When describing NPCs or environments, include details that hint at something players can interact with, explore, or exploit.
    • Example: Instead of “Her eyes are a shifting mottled green” (pure description), add “…and you notice she never stands more than one long step away from the table and its contents” (actionable: hints at possessiveness, or that the table is important).
    • Example: “The pillars are ornately carved marble” (descriptive) vs. “…the furthest one is crossed with a latticework of cracks” (actionable: hints at structural weakness, a potential collapse, or a secret passage).
  • Details That Matter: These details should allow players to make informed decisions and take effective action. You can embed them within your layered environments, but ensure they ultimately have a purpose that players can discover.
  • Make Mysteries into Problems: Don’t hoard “secret lore” just for the sake of it. While maintaining some mystery is fun, lore only becomes truly engaging when it transforms into a problem for the players to solve. Link lore and mysteries to something players already desire, like treasure or a solution to a current dilemma.
    • Example: Don’t just have an ancient prophecy about a forgotten god. Tie it to a powerful artifact that players want, or a looming cataclysm that requires them to understand the prophecy to avert.

NPCs Aren’t Scripts

Non-Player Characters (NPCs) should feel like living beings with their own lives and motivations, not just tools for the GM’s plot.

  • Independent Motivations: Give NPCs a motivation or concern that doesn’t directly involve the PCs. This grants them depth and makes them feel grounded in the world. It also provides a “lever” that PCs can discover and pull to influence the NPC.
    • Example: The innkeeper might be worried about his sick child, not just about serving ale. The bandit captain might be trying to raise enough money to pay off a powerful overlord, not just randomly attacking travelers.
  • Realistic Behavior (Especially in Combat): Treat NPCs like real people. They want to survive and will rarely initiate fights they don’t believe they can win easily. Most NPCs (unless fanatical) will try to retreat or surrender if they are losing, rather than fighting to the death. This makes combat more dynamic and strategic.
    • Example: A group of cultists might fight fiercely, but if their leader falls and half their number are defeated, the rest might break and flee, or even offer information in exchange for their lives.
  • Reaction and Morale Rolls: Use Reaction Rolls (to determine initial NPC attitudes towards the PCs) and Morale Rolls (to determine if enemies flee or surrender during combat) liberally.
    • Reaction Rolls add variety to encounters, showing that not every interaction needs to escalate to combat immediately.
    • Morale Rolls prevent battles from becoming a “slog” or a “slaughter,” making combat more dynamic and allowing for outcomes other than total annihilation.

Keep The World Alive

The OSR world is a dynamic place that continues to exist and react even when the PCs aren’t directly interacting with every part of it.

  • Improvisation and Extrapolation: OSR thrives on the GM’s ability to improvise and extrapolate. During and between sessions, constantly ask yourself: “What are the logical consequences of the PCs’ actions?” and “How would other characters and factions in the world respond?” Develop these elements accordingly.
    • Example: If the PCs clear out a goblin lair, what happens to the territory the goblins used to control? Does another faction move in? Does the local lord send someone to investigate?
  • Give Players a Stake: As the game progresses, PCs will accumulate wealth and experience. Encourage them to use this money to buy property, hire retainers, or even found factions or strongholds. This deepens their investment in the world and opens up new avenues for interaction and historical impact beyond dungeon delving.
    • Example: A PC uses their accumulated gold to buy a rundown tower and recruit a small band of sellswords. Now, the player cares about local politics, trade routes, and potential threats to their new base, integrating them more deeply into the living world.

Advanced Theory

That’s What’s Happening: Modeling Game Reality

This discussion highlights a crucial divergence in how different RPGs construct their foundational “reality.” It’s about what the game chooses to emphasize and track, which profoundly impacts the experience at the table.

Normal RPGs: Modeling Objects and Entities

Most traditional roleplaying games, like D&D or many OSR games, focus their design on detailed modeling of objects and entities within the game world.

  • Focus on Detailed Stats: Think of characters, monsters, and gear as collections of numerical attributes.
    • Example: “Here’s my dude (a character) with his friends. He’s 3 strong, 2 skilled. He owns an axe that’s 3 sharp and a shield that’s 4 hard. Altogether, he has 12 hit points.”
    • Example (Enemy): “Here’s an enemy warrior (a character/monster), who is a total of 14 dangerous, with two 2-sharp swords, 4-hard armor, 3 strength, and 3 skill.” This means the game primarily defines what a character or item is in terms of its fixed numerical qualities.
  • Actions as Comparisons: When an action occurs, the game frames it as a comparison between these detailed entities along their relevant statistical axes. Dice rolls are then used to introduce an element of chance to see which side “wins” that comparison.
    • Example: “My dude (3 strong, 2 skilled) faces a cliff (7 steep). Ready… Set… COMPARE! I roll my dice, add my strength, and compare it to the cliff’s steepness. The result: the cliff is too steep for my dude to climb.”
    • Example (Combat): “My dude (3 strong, 2 skilled, 3-sharp axe, 4-hard shield) faces the enemy warrior (14 dangerous, two 2-sharp swords, 4-hard armor, 3 strength, 3 skill). Ready… Set… COMPARE! After dice rolls, the enemy warrior degrades my dude: -2 to his strength and -2 to his shield.” This often leads to binary succeed/fail outcomes.
  • Outcomes as Degradation/Improvement: When outcomes go beyond simple success or failure, normal RPGs typically handle this by directly improving or degrading the existing attributes of the modeled objects and entities.
    • Example (Combat Outcome): The enemy warrior’s attack doesn’t just “hit”; it causes a reduction in the character’s strength and shield effectiveness. The core stats change, but the framework of what the “dude” is (a collection of stats) remains the same.
    • In Sum for Normal RPGs: These games describe objects and entities in significant detail, resolving actions by statically comparing their qualities. Outcomes are usually recorded as benefits or detriments to these very same static attributes.

Apocalypse World: Modeling Actions and Their Consequences

Apocalypse World (and its many “Powered by the Apocalypse” (PbtA) descendants) takes a fundamentally different approach. While items and entities still exist, the game prioritizes modeling actions in detail and their immediate, narrative consequences.

  • Focus on Player Moves: Instead of extensive character stat blocks, PbtA games define a suite of “Moves” that characters can make. These moves are narrative triggers that encapsulate common actions in the game’s genre.
    • Example (Driver Character): “Here’s my driver. She can make all the basic moves (like ‘Go Aggro’ or ‘Read a Sitch’), and she has a suite of her own unique moves (like ‘Gearhead’ or ‘Battle-Skilled’). She owns a car, which lets her make some additional moves (like ‘Hot-wire a Car’), and a crowbar, with which she can do violence in some ways but not others (it might enable a ‘Do Violence’ move, but not a ‘Shoot a Gun’ move).”
    • This means the game primarily defines what a character does and how they do it through their unique suite of abilities.
  • Actions as Combined Effects: PbtA games rarely directly compare characters’ stats against each other in a head-to-head fashion. Instead, when multiple characters act, their individual “Moves” are resolved, and the GM adjudicates the combined effects of their actions on the fictional reality.
    • Example: “When we both Seize Something by Force, we don’t compare our characters’ strengths or weaknesses directly. Instead, we each roll our dice independently for the ‘Seize Something by Force’ move, we each make our own choices based on the outcome of our roll, and we find out together: what are the combined effects of our actions? Maybe one of us gets what we want but takes a beating, while the other creates a distraction but draws too much attention.”
  • Outcomes as Direct Fictional Assertions: PbtA games don’t just reduce outcomes to numerical stat changes. They assert consequences directly into the ongoing narrative, creating a new, changed situation that demands a response.
    • Example: “Apocalypse World says that dismaying your enemy, or seizing definite hold of something, is as valuable and as real an outcome as degrading your enemy’s hit points. The game’s action, it says, must continue from this new, changed situation.”
    • Consequence-Driven Questions: The game constantly asks: “Who’s lying bleeding? Who’s in pain? Who’s still holding a gun? Who’s shocked by the suddenness of the violence and dismayed by the urgency of the fallout? What do you do now?” These questions immediately push the narrative forward from the changed circumstances.
    • In Sum for Apocalypse World: Rather than primarily defining characters by their static attributes, these games prioritize defining the actions characters can take and immediately establishing the direct fictional consequences of those actions.

So What? (Implications for RPG Design and Play)

This fundamental difference in modeling has profound implications, especially if you’re playing an RPG to create compelling fiction.

  • Different Approaches to Fiction:
    • Normal RPGs: Tend to generate fiction through the resolution of challenges based on pre-defined attributes. The story emerges from the successes and failures in comparing these stats. “My strong character attempted a difficult climb; he failed, so he broke his leg.” The focus is on the character’s inherent qualities meeting a challenge’s inherent difficulty.
    • Apocalypse World: Generates fiction through the immediate consequences of narrative actions and player choices within those actions. The story emerges from the cascade of “Moves” and the GM’s responses. “I Go Aggro on the leader. I roll badly. The GM says, ‘Okay, he’s not intimidated. Instead, he grabs your weapon and slams you against the wall. What do you do?’” The focus is on the action taken and the fictional repercussions it directly causes.
  • Designing Your Own RPG: Understanding this distinction is vital. Are you creating a game where players define their characters primarily by what they are (their stats), or primarily by what they do (their actions/moves)? Both models are valid, but they lead to different types of gameplay, different GMing styles, and different narrative outputs. A game that tries to do both without a clear primary focus can feel muddled.

This comparison isn’t about which model is “better,” but about recognizing that they are distinct tools for analyzing and synthesizing fictional reality in an RPG.

Blorb (Preservation of Integrity)

Blorb is a prep-focused playstyle where the referee prepares a detailed world, but the story emerges organically from play. It is a set of principles by Sandra Snan. https://idiomdrottning.org/blorb-principles

What Does “Blorb” Mean?

The word “blorb” is a made-up word borrowed from an old computer game that basically means “to preserve integrity,” and in this context, it aims to preserve the integrity of how the referee runs the game as a fair and impartial arbiter.

Never Prep Plot, Prep Entities

Focus your preparation on entities: locations, enemies, allies, items, and rewards (Porte-Monstre-Trésor). Avoid pre-scripting what will happen; instead, let events arise from mechanics, dice rolls, and player choices. The game’s narrative should be emergent, not prewritten.

No Paper After Seeing Rock

Commit to your preparations before play. Just as in a game of Paper-Scissors-Stone, you can’t change your choice after seeing your opponent’s. If your prep states “this room has 3d6 skeletons,” that’s what’s there when the players enter. This ensures players make real choices that have real consequences, without the referee secretly altering outcomes.

Three Tiers of Truth

When asked a question about the game world, the referee should prioritize answers in this order:

  1. Prep (Tier 1): Consult your prewritten notes. If the answer is there, use it. This is the most solid truth.
  2. Rules/Mechanics (Tier 2): If not in prep, use established rules, default settings (e.g., “a typical office has a stapler”), or random tables. This builds your referee’s toolbox.
  3. Improvise (Tier 3): If neither of the above applies, make something up on the spot. Keep it neutral (no immediate huge boons or threats). Crucially, patch this hole in your prep for future sessions, ideally by adding to your Tier 2 rules.

Always work down these tiers, only improvising when necessary, and then using improvisation to build more robust prep over time.

Wallpaper Salience

Prioritize preparing elements with high “salience”—things that are critical to the game’s mechanics or player interaction. Stats for enemies, core item properties, and key location features should be prepped rigorously. Mundane details like wallpaper color can be improvised. However, if a less salient detail (like wallpaper color) suddenly becomes relevant (e.g., via a “teleport through green walls” potion), then it becomes a high-salience detail that requires immediate preparation. While some improvisation is fine, a satisfying Blorb game needs some prepped “wallpaper” to feel rich and consistent.

Salience Time Zoom

Game time should flow at the speed needed to resolve player and referee questions. This means fast-forwarding through uneventful periods and slowing down for important interactions or checks. The referee’s role is to facilitate the question-and-answer flow, not to dramatically pace the game. If players state they’re waiting, ask for how long to accurately account for resources and checks.

Prepping is Different from Running

The mindset for preparing a module is distinct from running it. As a prepper, you consider themes, balance, and evocative elements. As a runner, you are committed to your prep. You are the referee, adjudicating the game between the players and the module, not an opponent. If outcomes are boring, unbalanced, too easy, or too hard, that’s part of the emergent play and must be accepted. Like a puzzle designer, the module writer aims for an interesting and meaningful experience, not necessarily a balanced challenge.

Diegetical Mechanics

Blorb’s committed prep allows for “diegetical mechanics,” where game elements are directly tied to the in-world actions and realities of the characters. Unlike symbolic mechanics (e.g., “roll X skill”), diegetical mechanics focus on what characters would do and find in the game world (e.g., “If they pull the left lever, cake appears. If they pull the right, they die.”). This approach immerses players by having them engage directly with in-game details: “How many torches do I have left?” or “Where would I hide a figurine if it were me?” This fosters a more tactile and immediate connection to the game world.

Blorb Principles: Prep & Play Explained

Blorb emphasizes a particular style of “Game Mastering” (GMing) where robust preparation underpins emergent gameplay. It’s about building a detailed, reactive world, not a predetermined story.

Never Prep Plot, Prep Entities

This is perhaps the most crucial principle. Instead of writing a storyline (e.g., “The players will meet the mayor, then fight goblins in the woods, then find a magic sword”), focus on creating the building blocks of your world.

What to prep:

  • Places (Porte): Detailed descriptions of rooms, dungeons, towns, wilderness areas. What do they look like? What’s their history? What unique features do they have?
    • Example: Instead of “The players will find the lost temple,” prep “The Sunken Temple of Xylos: A crumbling Aztec-inspired ruin half-submerged in a jungle lagoon. It has three levels, covered in venomous vines, and the lower chambers flood at high tide. There’s a giant stone calendar puzzle on the second level.”
  • Enemies (Monstre): Who are the antagonists? What are their stats, motivations, and lair?
    • Example: Instead of “They’ll fight the bandit leader,” prep “Kaelen the Red: A ruthless human bandit captain (Fighter Lvl 3, AC 15, HP 24, Attacks: sword 1d8, Crossbow 1d6) who extorts local merchants. She has a personal grudge against Sir Reginald and a pet giant constrictor snake named ‘Squeeze’ in her hidden camp.”
  • Friends (or Neutrals): Who might the players meet? What are their personalities, goals, and useful information?
    • Example: Instead of “An old wizard will give them a quest,” prep “Old Man Hemlock: A reclusive herbalist (Magic-User Lvl 2) living in a moss-covered cottage. He’s paranoid about a local fey creature stealing his rare plants but knows much about the local flora and hidden forest paths.”
  • Items (Trésor): What treasures, magical or mundane, exist in the world? Where are they? What do they do?
    • Example: Instead of “They’ll get a magic sword,” prep “The Sunblade of Eldoria: A +1 longsword with a golden hilt. Once per day, it can cast Light as a 1st-level Magic-User spell. It’s currently embedded in a stone gargoyle’s mouth in the crypt of Castle Blackwood.”
  • Rewards: What non-item rewards exist? Faction reputation, titles, unique knowledge?
    • Example: Instead of “They’ll save the town,” prep “Saving the town of Oakhaven earns the party a permanent discount at all local shops, the respect of the town guard, and the offer of free lodging at the ‘Green Dragon Inn’ whenever they visit.”

Why no plot? Because pre-scripted plots are fragile. Players rarely follow the “script,” leading to constant improvisation that often feels less consistent or satisfying than emergent play. When you prep entities, the players’ actions create the plot as they interact with your detailed world. If they ignore Kaelen the Red and decide to investigate Old Man Hemlock’s fey problem, you have robust prep ready for that.

No Paper After Seeing Rock

This principle champions commitment to your preparation. It’s about maintaining consistency and player agency.

  • The Analogy: Imagine playing Paper-Scissors-Stone. If one person sees the other throw “rock” and then chooses to throw “paper,” that’s cheating. In Blorb, the referee’s “throw” (the prep) happens before the players make their move.
  • Quantum OSR is the “Cheat”: “Quantum OSR” (or “Schrödinger’s Dungeon”) refers to the practice where the referee doesn’t define something until the players interact with it. For example, a referee might think, “I’ll decide what’s behind Door A when they open it.” This is “cheating” because it allows the referee to always create the “optimal” or “desired” outcome, undermining player choices. If the players choose Door A, and the referee then decides it leads to the perfect encounter for them, their choice wasn’t truly impactful.
  • Consequences of Cheating: If players discover (or even suspect) that the world adapts to their choices rather than reacts to them, their decisions lose meaning. Why strategize or risk danger if the referee will just ensure a certain outcome?
  • Practical Application: If your prep says, “Room 3: Contains 3d6 goblins, a rusty chest, and a tripwire leading to a pit trap,” then that’s exactly what the players encounter. If they manage to bypass it, great! If they trigger it, that’s the consequence of their actions. You wrote it down, you committed to it. This commitment creates genuine tension and makes player decisions truly matter.

Three Tiers of Truth

This is a practical guide for how to answer player questions about the game world, ensuring consistency while allowing for necessary improvisation. It’s a hierarchy of “truth” in your game.

  1. Tier 1: Written Prep (The Bones of Steel): This is the highest tier of truth. It’s what you have explicitly written down in your module or notes. When a player asks, “What’s in the office?” your first step is to check your prep.
    • Example: “The office contains a mahogany desk, a locked strongbox (DC 15 to pick), and a portrait of a stern-looking man.” This is set.
  2. Tier 2: Rules or Mechanics (The Tool Box): If the answer isn’t explicitly in your prep, consult your established rules, default assumptions, or random tables. This helps standardize answers and build consistency.
    • Example: If the office isn’t prepped, you might have a “Default Office Contents” table: “1d4 pieces of common furniture, 1d2 mundane desk items, 1d6% chance of a hidden compartment.” Or a general rule: “All offices in this city have a standard set of writing implements and a file cabinet.”
  3. Tier 3: Improvise (The Patching Cloud): If neither Tier 1 nor Tier 2 provides an answer, make something up on the spot.
    • Example: “The office is surprisingly sparse, just a rickety wooden chair and a dusty shelf with a single, unlabelled bottle.”
    • The Patching Imperative: The critical part of Tier 3 is that you must patch the hole in your prep for future sessions. If you improvised that bottle, consider whether you need a “random bottle contents” table (Tier 2) or if you want to explicitly define what’s in this specific bottle for this specific office (Tier 1). This process continually strengthens your prep. Don’t feel bad about improvising; it’s how you learn and how your world grows, but use it as a trigger to improve your prep for next time.

Wallpaper Salience

This principle guides what you should prioritize in your preparation, focusing on elements that have mechanical weight or are difficult to improvise consistently.

  • High Salience (Carved in Granite): These are the “sharp ends”—things with direct mechanical impact or that are critical to player decisions.
    • Examples: Enemy stat blocks, monster Hit Dice, exact treasure values, the specific effects of a magic item, the precise dimensions of a pit trap, the number of guards on patrol. If you write, “The bandit captain has a stat block,” you better have that stat block ready!
  • Low Salience (Improvised Wallpaper): These are the “flavor layer” details that contribute to immersion but don’t usually have immediate mechanical consequences.
    • Examples: The color of the dungeon walls, the specific pattern on a rug, the name of a minor NPC shopkeeper, the scent in a room. You can improvise these on the fly without breaking the game’s integrity.
  • Dynamic Salience: The key insight is that salience can change. If your players find a “Potion of Green Wall Teleportation,” then suddenly the color of every wall becomes highly salient, and you’ll need to prep that (perhaps by creating a random “Wall Color Table” as a Tier 2 truth).
  • Practical Prep: It’s okay to improvise some “wallpaper” details, but a truly rich Blorb campaign will have some prepped flavor elements too. The goal isn’t to prep everything, but to know what needs solid prep and what can be improvised, and to adapt your prep when improvisation reveals a new area of salience.

Salience Time Zoom

This principle describes how the referee should manage the passage of time in the game, responding dynamically to player inquiry rather than trying to dictate narrative pace.

  • Q&A Mindset: The game unfolds as a continuous series of questions and answers between players and the referee. “What do I find?” “What happens next?” “How long does X take?”
  • Zoom In/Out: Time isn’t a fixed, steady flow.
    • Fast-Forward (Zoom Out): If players declare, “We spend a week training in the city,” you don’t roleplay every minute. You “fast-forward” through the week, asking: “Okay, what do you do each day? Do you need food? Are there any random encounters or complications during that week?” You skip directly to the outcomes and any relevant checks (e.g., training rolls, random encounters over a week).
    • Slow Down (Zoom In): If players are searching a room meticulously or engaged in a tense negotiation, you slow down to a blow-by-blow, minute-by-minute, or even turn-by-turn pace. “You search the desk. What exactly are you looking for? Okay, roll a Dexterity check to see if you find the hidden drawer.”
  • Player-Driven Pace: The players’ questions and stated intentions drive the time flow. If they say, “We wait for someone to arrive,” you’d ask, “How long are you willing to wait?” This tells you how many turns or hours to account for in terms of resources (rations, light sources) and random checks (wandering monsters, events). The referee shouldn’t force a dramatic pace; they should just accurately reflect the passage of time as it relates to the player’s stated actions.

Prepping is Different from Running

This highlights a critical mental shift for the referee: the person designing the content (the “prepper” or “module writer”) is not the same as the person running the game at the table.

  • Prepper Mindset: When you’re preparing, you consider themes, narrative arcs (if any), balancing challenges, and making things evocative or interesting. You might ponder, “How many wolves would make a good challenge for a Level 2 party in this forest?”
  • Runner Mindset (The Referee): Once the game starts, all those considerations go out the window. You are no longer trying to craft a “good play experience” in the moment. You are now the impartial referee of the world you’ve prepared.
    • Commitment: If your prep says there are 7 wolves, there are 7 wolves, even if the party is struggling. You don’t secretly change it to 3 to make it “fair.”
    • Outcome Acceptance: The game will sometimes be too easy, too hard, too boring, or too exciting. That’s okay. These are the emergent consequences of player choice interacting with a committed world.
  • Players vs. Module: The conflict is between the players and the challenges presented by the module/world, not between the players and the referee. The referee’s job is to apply the rules fairly and consistently to the world as prepped.
  • Analogy to Zendo: Like the board game Zendo, where the rule chosen before play cannot be altered during the round, the referee’s prep is “marked on a hidden card.” You created a puzzle (your module); now your job is to honestly adjudicate how the players solve it, not to move the pieces around for them.

Diegetical Mechanics

This principle advocates for game mechanics that are deeply embedded in the game world and reflect in-character actions, rather than abstract game-level procedures.

  • Diegesis: The “story world” or narrative of the game.
  • Diegetical Mechanics: Rules that exist within the fiction. They are things the characters themselves would directly interact with or be concerned about.
    • Examples: “How many torches do I have left?” (a character concern). “What are these weird levers on the wall?” (a character’s direct observation). “Where would I hide a figurine if it were me?” (a character’s logical deduction).
  • Symbolic Mechanics: Abstract rules that exist outside the fiction, for the players’ convenience.
    • Examples: “Scratch one use of Adventuring Gear™” (a meta-game abstraction for inventory). “Usage Dice” (an abstract roll to see if supplies run out). “Roll ‘Skill Check A’” (a generic mechanic not tied to specific in-world details).
  • Blorb Preference: Blorb prefers diegetical mechanics. If inventory management is important to the genre (like dungeon crawling), then characters (and thus players) should care about specific items: “Do I have enough rope to cross this chasm?” “How many rations do we have left?”
  • Immersion: This emphasis on diegetical mechanics aims to transport players into the game world, making them engage with its specific details rather than pushing abstract buttons. It fosters a feeling of “being there” and dealing with concrete, in-world problems.

Understanding “Blorbiness” in RPGs

“Blorb” describes a specific quality in an RPG where the game world’s elements are pre-defined and immutable by the Game Master (GM) during play. It’s about a concrete, established game world that players interact with, rather than a narrative that unfolds based solely on GM whim or player-scripting.

The Exquisite Quality of Blorbiness

A blorby situation means the environment, monsters, items, and events are all canonically decided and typically written down beforehand (e.g., in a module or GM notes). This might include random encounter tables, but the existence of those tables is part of the pre-decided world.

  • Player Interaction: Players might know some of this information, or they might need to discover it through investigation. Their challenges arise from this established reality: finding a specific item, navigating a trapped floor, or uncovering a secret from a non-player character (NPC).
  • GM’s Role: The GM’s role is to present this pre-existing world. They are not introducing new elements on a whim or changing things to fit a desired plot. The “playing pieces” and the “hard landscape” are set before the players even create their characters. The GM knew there was a village, its inhabitants, what was for sale, its problems, and what was in nearby wilderness or dungeons.
  • Commitment: Blorb emphasizes the GM’s commitment to their preparation. For example, if a room description says “3d6 skeletons,” that’s precisely what’s there, regardless of what the GM might feel like having in the moment. This fosters genuine player agency and meaningful choices, as the world isn’t bending to their actions but reacting to them.
  • Desired Quality: For fans of Blorb, this pre-defined, reactive world is the core appeal. They seek games and modules that provide a solid, explorable framework, rather than ones that are heavily scripted, railroaded, or full of undefined “blank spaces” that require constant on-the-fly improvisation.

Not Blorb: Contrasting Philosophies

Blorb is just one approach to RPG design. Other philosophies exist, and understanding them helps define Blorb by contrast.

  • Story Games: These are often the opposite of blorby. Story games prioritize collaborative narrative creation, where players and GMs are more akin to co-authors or scriptwriters. The focus is on building a compelling story together, often with mechanics that explicitly encourage narrative input and steer the plot. They are fantastic for their purpose but are generally un-blorby due to their emergent, non-pre-defined nature.
  • “90s Games” (and their legacy): This term refers to a category of games (often including many from the 1970s onwards) that, from a Blorb perspective, are frustratingly vague on the GMing side. While they offer detailed character creation and player-facing rules (e.g., extensive skill lists, feat trees, powers), their GM sections often provide little concrete guidance on world preparation.
    • The Problem: GMs are often told to “make it tense and dramatic like a movie,” or given vague instructions to create “flowcharts of scenes” or “skill challenges.” This results in either heavy railroading (GM forcing a pre-planned story) or excessive winging it (GM constantly improvising everything). Both outcomes are considered undesirable from a Blorb perspective.
    • The Pet Theory: Historically, many early GMs played with a blorby mindset (like in B2 Keep on the Borderlands) even when using rulesets that didn’t explicitly teach it. They instinctively prepped places, obstacles, and rewards. However, over time, GMs began compromising blorbiness for perceived “epic” moments or “fairness” (e.g., fudging dice, altering encounters). Simultaneously, the “player-facing” side of games became increasingly complex, while the “GM-facing” side became hollowed out, assuming GMs already knew how to “blorb.” As new generations of GMs emerged without these early blorby touchstones, the culture shifted towards less structured “adventure paths” or story-focused improvisation, creating the disconnect.

Hybrid Approaches

Some modern games blend elements, combining a structured approach with player-driven narrative.

  • Apocalypse World, Blades in the Dark, Fate: These popular games incorporate functional, procedure-oriented backbones (like PbtA’s “moves”) typically found in story games, but they still retain a strong player-facing “feel” of an adventure game. While their underlying “physics” for resolving actions might differ from traditional RPGs (as discussed in “That’s What’s Happening”), they can still foster a “blorby feel” once a situation is clearly established and players understand the set elements.
  • Atomic Encounters (e.g., Fate, The Shadow of Yesterday): These games can achieve a blorby feel by focusing on setting up individual scenes or “atomic encounters” with a blorby approach, rather than detailing an entire game world upfront. This means each scene or encounter is well-defined and committed to, even if the larger world isn’t entirely pre-prepped in the same depth as a traditional dungeon crawl.

Orthogonal Classification Axes

“Blorby vs. Unblorby” is just one way to categorize RPGs. Other distinctions exist, and Blorb can work well across them:

  • Rules-Light vs. Rules-Heavy: Blorb can thrive in both.
    • Rules-Light Blorb: A richly detailed “hard landscape” full of interesting challenges and “toys” for players to interact with means you don’t need many complex rules, as the world itself provides the bulk of the gameplay.
    • Rules-Heavy Blorb: For crunchy games with detailed character builds, a blorby world ensures that all the effort players put into optimizing their characters actually matters. Their powerful characters have a tangible, consistent reality to interact with, rather than just “shadowboxing” against a constantly shifting, uncommitted GM.
  • Shared Touchstones: What unites many RPGs (including neo-traditional ones like PbtA) is that the character serves as the player’s primary interface with the game world. Even if the mechanics differ, the player still embodies a character with defined capabilities and attributes (stats, HP), and the player-facing rules are built around these character capabilities.