1d6 Bounty Hunters Six villains who hunt wanted PCs or whoever the PCs are hunting. Dead or alive, always.  1. Lolelia Rakva  Her skin is a beautiful pastel bl...

When PCs get a bounty on their heads, you need cool+colorful characters to hunt them down. Here are six: traipse.hexarcana.com/2026/04/1d6-...

Yamantaka // Sonic Titan deserved the kind of career King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard has

This rocks

Melville once wrote of Moby-Dick: “it is of the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships’ cables & hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, & birds of prey hover over it.”
I hope one day something I write can be described the same way

Yeah I frequently have alignment come up in my game's setting, but it could still have much more impact in the system. Mechanical weight compliments narrative.

Also tangential but IMO fascism is much more Chaos than Law; both ultimately come down to "the world can burn as long as I get mine"

I actually really like alignment (L-N-C of course, I don't care for G and E) but every OSR game plays like it doesn't exist. I endeavor to find a way to make it more relevant in my games and yet every attempt has left me wanting. This is my curse.

Leaving the typo in so you know it's serious

The conversation about what is lost when shortcuts and conveniences are used in TTRPG writing can be extended to OSR mechanics mechanics meant to sand off "rote" aspects of old games. Overloaded encounter dice are the bullet points of game mechanics.
traipse.hexarcana.com/2026/03/work...

Illustrations like these are important for kids because they feed the part of the mind that craves the grotesque. You learned the pages you never turn to, save for when compelled by morbid curiosity... better to be occasionally distressed by a picture in a kids book than anesthetized by cocomelon

People seem to have a lot of trouble grasping that "when I was younger these games felt different" is a lead-in to a broader discussion not just some stand-alone argument

The Spawn of Shub-Niggurath gurgles menacingly as it approaches

You arrive at a village ruled by『the Unapproachable Radiance』 and see this. What do you do

Picture this: Carcosa but the visual inspiration is old school Tokusatsu

The only remotely good Harry Potter-adjacent thing is Wizard People Dear Reader and that's only because of the amount of times Brad Neely gets to say "lo." Period end of story.

The original version of the generator in Strategic Review #1 has the line "If no room is beyond a door check again on TABLE I. 30' after passing by or through a door." No idea why Gygax turned that into something significantly more complicated but that's AD&D I suppose.

Appendix A made a lot more sense to me when I realized it's just rolling on Table I and treating Tables II-VIII like subtables for when you get a result that isn't "Continue Straight." The whole thing is meant to procedurally generate a dungeon as you play, which Gygax isn't super clear about

Congrats! Impressive lift

Forget it, Fafhrd. It's Lankhmar.

Glad you like it!

You're framing of the issue as a "maladaption" is spot on. I think the source of the issue is the common wisdom that it's the players and not the ref who should describe what the PCs do. The false-start "what do you do?" question doesn't do anything to preserve player agency

MIGHT DICE: New House Rule for Fighters Everyone has a fix for the Fighter. Every OSR game. Every blogger. I have . You have. It's a veritable right of passage. I have tried quite ...

Does the world have room for yet another OSR fighter fix? Yes. Specifically this one: traipse.hexarcana.com/2026/03/migh...

This is too cool. Great work

Hell yeah. Pale Fire's one of my favorites as well. Should be required reading for anyone interested in games/books/game books

A screenshot of a document reading: "A prestige version of a character class is available to players who run a character of that class to level 4 or satisfy in-game conditions as that class. Here are some examples: Acrobat (Thief): Survive a fall of 30’ or more. Assassin (Thief): Slay an assassin initiate and take their place. Druid (Cleric): Renounce your god, burn down a church, and wander the wilderness for 6 months. Illusionist (Magic-User): Acquire a totem from the Place of Shadows. Paladin (Fighter): Find a holy sword and complete the quest it bestows you. Ranger (Fighter): Slay or subdue a beast of legend. Slayer (Cleric): Accept a blood-curse in order to slay a demon or undead foe. Classes not listed here may also become available over the course of the game."

"A prestige version of a character class is available to players who run a character of that class to level 4 or satisfy in-game conditions as that class. Here are some examples: Acrobat (Thief): Survive a fall of 30’ or more. Assassin (Thief): Slay an assassin initiate and take their place. Druid (Cleric): Renounce your god, burn down a church, and wander the wilderness for 6 months. Illusionist (Magic-User): Acquire a totem from the Place of Shadows. Paladin (Fighter): Find a holy sword and complete the quest it bestows you. Ranger (Fighter): Slay or subdue a beast of legend. Slayer (Cleric): Accept a blood-curse in order to slay a demon or undead foe. [the following sentence is in white font, highlighted to make it visible] Paramander (Fighter): discover the Paramander and take up their cause. Classes not listed here may also become available over the course of the game."

Working on a doc for my players about unlockable classes. One of the classes is unlocked by discovering it exists.

Great post! I wouldn't want to see it be ubiquitous either. I actually like what you do better; I like when monsters are treated as a unique threat with their own rules and idiosyncrasies instead of just being essentially animals

I feel like conceiving of monsters this way solves a lot of worldbuilding issues people run into

A common thing in JRPGs and other video games you don't see so much in fantasy TTRPGs is when monsters are a relatively recent phenomenon in the setting. It's either implied or outright stated that everything was fine and placid until the BBEG appeared, and now there are monsters everywhere

I heard 1d6 flies buzz when I died