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About Me

Lance Duncan

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My Blog Roll

B/X BLACKRAZOR

The Rundown - I am writing this Thursday morning, though I don't intend it to post up till Sunday. The holidays have caught up to me and my time over the next week or so...
15 hours ago
ZENOPUS ARCHIVES

The Mirkwood Tales RPG: the link between the original D&D rules and text-based computer games - *Cover of Mirkwood Tales, 1977, by Eric S. Roberts* In May 1977, the all-text computer game *Adventure*, also known as Advent or Colossal Cave, "became t...
20 hours ago
The Alexandrian

Random D&D Tip: Acrobatics vs. Athletics - When it comes time to roll the dice, figuring out which skill to use is an essential part of how a GM makes a ruling in most RPGs. D&D 5th Edition is no ex...
2 days ago
Monsters and Manuals

My Shoe is Safe - Yesterday's quiz was a toughie. In it, to recap, commenters were encouraged to guess at what the following pieces of art, generated by Substack's own AI ...
2 days ago
The Other Side blog

This Old Dragon: Issue #115 - [image: Dragon Magazine #115] I think I have enough time left in this year to do another one of these. My box of old Dragons, though, is getting a little li...
2 days ago
Breeyark.org - "It's OK — Gary sent us."

Gloomland – A Travel Stone Adventure - By G. Bruce MacKenzieA FANTASY GAMING AID FOR LABYRINTH LORD AND OTHER BASIC/EXPERT RULESFOR CHARACTERS OF LEVELS 1–3 The Wise The post Gloomland – A Trav...
3 days ago
Jeffs Gameblog

Latest Releases Now Available from the US Webstore + YEAR END SALE! -
4 days ago
Hack & Slash

On Manifestos - The paid media was instructed to not print this. To the Feds, I’ll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a leng...
5 days ago
OSR Grimoire

M4: Five Coins For A Kingdom - M4 "Five Coins For A Kingdom" (1987) by Allen Varney is a D&D adventure for four to six players of levels 28 to 32. *M4 "Five Coins For A Kingdom" (1987...
1 week ago
Adventures in Gaming v2

50 Years of Dungeons & Dragons -- Play! - And so, as others have mentioned, we come to the end of the first 50 years of *Dungeons & Dragons*. How to celebrate, you ask? Play. Play *Dungeons & ...
1 week ago
What a Horrible Night to Have a Curse...

My first 40 years as a role player - Today, I turned 51 years old. And, as I've mentioned on numerous previous birthdays (and probably numerous "how did you get into gaming" posts), I got my...
1 week ago
Gundobad Games

WIP: Painting the scratchbuilt "Chaos Defiler" - My last post showed off a proxy 40k Chaos crab-walker engine that I built mostly with just a few bucks' worth of scrap and thrift-store toy parts. I've ...
1 week ago
Goblin Punch

Blue Sky Temple, Revised - Last week, we made a crowdsourced dungeon on Bluesky. It was fun and it yielded a cool dungeon with a lot of good ideas mashed together. This week, I ...
1 week ago
Hidden in Shadows

Who Made Blackmoor? A History of Setting Development - In a sense Blackmoor "grew like Topsy", that is to say wild and on its own. Perhaps the first iteration of anything we might call Blackmoor is the well-d...
2 weeks ago
Pits Perilous

Games, Grinches, and Good Ideas... - As we enter the holiday season, yours truly can't help but remember what was doubtless the most important (and consequential) Christmas gift to ever grac...
2 weeks ago
Blog of Holding

a quick peek at 2024 Monster Manual math - As a monster designer, I’m interested in seeing where the 2024 Monster Manual takes monster design. How compatible are 2014 and 2024 monsters? What are the...
2 weeks ago
Gothridge Manor

City of Scorn - City of Scorn is one of the centerpieces in my current Shadowdark Campaign. I've never spent the time to draw each sector. Each of those black squares i...
2 weeks ago
Havards Blackmoor Blog

World of Greyhawk Gazetteer Revised on DMsGuild is Amazing and Free! - This excellent sourcebook was recently released on the DMsGuild from Cannibaal Press. The PDF can be bought for 0 USD or more if you like the book. Also, ...
2 weeks ago
Echoes from the Geekcave

All That Glitters - Continuing the earlier thoughts about gold in classic D&D… Over the years, one overall trend in my perspective on playing or running TTRPGS is an inc...
3 weeks ago
Signs in the Wilderness

Oracles; or, letting a Surprising Future derail your Story and Confound the Players - *At last the ragged wanderers found themselves at the sacred grove. There they sought an audience with the Oracle of the Broken Stone, to ask the one qu...
4 weeks ago
Greyhawk Grognard

Welcome new Greyhawk Fans! - With the publication of the new Dungeon Master’s Guide, there are doubtless going to be a lot of new D&D players interested in my favorite setting, the Wor...
1 month ago
The Retired Adventurer

Yes, You Can Translate and Share Six Cultures of Play for Noncommercial Purposes - I've been getting a lot of requests to translate Six Cultures of Play into various languages and for those translations to be posted on various RPG sites...
2 months ago
Delta's D&D Hotspot

Star Frontiers: Volturnus Racial Abilities - [image: Ul-Mor in desert] As you'll know if you followed the spring season of Dan's Olde Time Minis Show, I've been playing the classic Star Frontiers ga...
3 months ago
Bat in the Attic

Concerning the Future of Traveller - I have been a fan of Traveller for a long time and have bought various books over the years from just about every Traveller licensee, as well as from Ma...
3 months ago
Paul's Gameblog

B/X Weapons - On Wandering DMs yesterday Dan and I were discussing the differences between OD&D and B/X and we got into the topic of equipment. Back in the day when I wa...
4 months ago
About Bruce Heard and New Stories

The Great Carriage - This is the second of three Mammoth Masher vehicles. For continuity, see the previous two War Machine articles: the *Command Chariot* and the *Vanguard W...
5 months ago
Roles, Rules, and Rolls

Mass Combat 3: Delta's Book of War (and its inspiration) - Back in the early days of the Old School Revival, Delta's D&D Hotspot was a place to go for thoughtful design and scholarship, firmly rooted in the class...
5 months ago
Dragons Never Forget

Indulge Me - I miss magazines. There was a time when you could walk into any shop and you’d find a plethora of gaming magazines in the used bins and on the new shelves....
6 months ago
Classic RPG Realms

Early TSR Modules: A Study in Style - 1978 B1 In Search of the Unknown -- Classic dungeon crawl which was designed to train DMs in stocking and to some extent designing dungeons D1 Descent i...
8 months ago
Playing at the World

Jim Ward's Adventure in Gygax's Wonderland - Last weekend at GaryCon, many of us raised a glass to the memory of Jim Ward, who passed away just days before the convention. Ward was very helpful to m...
8 months ago
RPG MUSINGS

Running an RPG at a CON - RPG convention time is in full swing and that makes this a good time to give some advice to those who are thinking of running a game session at a CON. Here...
1 year ago
for h in hexes:

Physics Sage Abilities: LLM Edition - The other day, Alexis mentioned he was testing out ChatGPT to suggest sage abilities. I thought it might be interesting to apply this to my investigation...
1 year ago
The Nine and Thirty Kingdoms

A Short Update - Nothing new to share in terms of D&D stuff, but I have to say I've been a little more productive on another project now that all social media sites are u...
1 year ago
Save Vs. Dragon

Monster Stat Concept: Disposition - Yesterday, I introduced the concept of monster Motivations as a way to help understand how to use that monster when designing encounters, or what they mi...
1 year ago
The Tao of D&D

This is an Important Game Mechanic - *"That's the GM's Regional Map from my AOWG. And it's a damned good regional map. It's not a good map for a Simple Homebrew Campaign. It does some s$&...
2 years ago
Old Guy Gaming

Test - Learning This is a test post while I am learning the differences in the new to me visual and block (Gutenberg) editors. I will delete this post when I am d...
3 years ago
The Dragon's Flagon

A new beginning - I've been blogging here for a while now, but I think it's time to move on to a new blog with a new title. There's a lot of dragons and flagons and flago...
3 years ago
21st Century D&D

My Online Activities Are Elsewhere - I no longer maintain this blog, or 21stcenturydnd.com. I now do all my online writing, blogging, and creating under one roof at www.maxwelljoslyn.com, wher...
4 years ago
Known World, Old World

Troika! review/overview - As an avowed Advanced Fighting Fantasy fan, I've been a big fan of Daniel Sell's Troika!, even though I've STILL not got it to the table. It's a really te...
4 years ago
Fuzzy's Dicecapades

Alembics & Alchemists - I've been doing some more of my hysterical tinkering with the AD&D rules (treating 2e as an extensive revision of 1e, which is basically what it is in prac...
4 years ago
Treasure Hunters HQ

RIP Christopher Tolkien - LONDON (AP) – Christopher Tolkien, who played a major role protecting the legacy of his father’s The Lord of the Rings series, has died. He was 95. The Tol...
4 years ago
Cartonerd

Favourite maps from 2019 - Maps that cross my path must be getting better. Since I started this blog as a way to critique what I perceived as poorly designed maps, the number of blog...
4 years ago
Lake Geneva Original RPG Campaign

Merlynd the Magician: A Remembrance of Don Kaye, TSR's Co-Founder Now Available - LINK to Description and Ordering: https://www.tlbgames.com/collections/the-red-book-line/products/merlynd-the-magician
5 years ago
Bardiches & Bathhouses

Markwald - I have no intention of abandoning *Lukomorye* any time soon, but my goal was always expand into other historical-fantasy settings - a Central European-flav...
5 years ago
Urt's Outer Skin

Threshold - Threshold, the classic starting point for many a first foray into the Known World. This has been sat around on my hard drive for a while, almost, but not ...
5 years ago
Breath of Mystara

- Overland Movement in Karameikos (and actually all over Mystara) For my work in Threshold Magazine, I adjusted the Movement system in D&D BECMI a bit, as ...
5 years ago
DYVERS

2019 GREAT BLOG ROLL CALL IS LIVE - After working on the next iteration of the Great Blog Roll Call for the better part of the year I've finally finished it! This year's list has over 450 blo...
5 years ago
Cruel & Unusual Punishment

Them Bones of Adventuring - XXV: Stealth Revisited - *An ongoing exposition on table procedures for common exploration feats and rules, which began here with part one*. *Introduction* Though for the most tr...
5 years ago
Thorfinn Tait Cartography

Let’s Map Mystara 1985 - After a slow start, 1985 turned out to be Mystara’s biggest year yet, with the release of the full world map, as well as hex maps further increasing deta...
5 years ago
Sir Poley

On Overland Travel, Part 3: Random Encounters - In the first article in this series, I set out to prove Vaarsuvius wrong and to salvage Random Encounters in overland travel. In the second article in th...
5 years ago
Faerie Tales & Folklore

The Narrative Power of Emotion and Social Connection - One issue I have encountered with some regularity in my discussions with narrators and game masters is how to keep a group of adventures “on task” during a...
6 years ago
Save Versus
All Wands

Save Versus All Wands Contest: What is the Value of the Coin Hoard? - Treasure Type H Announcing the third annual (well, not quite) Save Versus All Wands contest! You can read about and see the results of the first two - *...
6 years ago
Stocking The Dungeon

Stocking the Dungeon is now on MeWe! - I never did a lot of RPG stuff on Google+, for some reason the interface and spam I'd run into there just kept me from getting that into it. I was a bit sa...
6 years ago
Spells and Steel

Phased Real-Time Combat - The Solution You Didn't Know You Needed - Phased Real-Time round structure dates back to the 1824 Kriegspiel rules; that is to say, to the very origin of wargames and of roleplaying games. The 1959...
6 years ago
For Honor...and Intrigue

Early Modern Price List - Some time ago I switched from running Honor+Intrigue to Star Wars D6 so I haven't posted anything for H+I in quite awhile. But on a forum I sometimes frequ...
7 years ago
Beyond the Black Gate

Adventure Lookup - This looks like a handy resource : AdventureLookup.com Looks like more than 200 1e/B/x/osr adventures in the database so far. Should come in handy next tim...
7 years ago
Semper Initiativus Unum

Happy Gygax Day! - July 27th was Gary Gygax's birthday, and now it's Gary Gygax Day. I think that's a worthy thing for the RPG community; Gary didn't create RPGs but he wa...
7 years ago
Merric’s Musings

Rules Spotlight: Surprise and the Assassin - The rules for the Assassin (a Roguish archetype) in the latest edition of Dungeons & Dragons include an extremely powerful ability: Assassinate. It’s the s...
7 years ago
The Fodder Cannon

Into the Crystalmist Mountains - Part 1 - Into the Crystalmist Mountains *A module compatible with the 5th edition of the world's most popular tabletop RPG!* *by Lance Kepner* *A group of adventu...
9 years ago

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