An OSR Community List of Settings

Wouldn’t it be nice if someone put together a list of dope OSR/OSR-adjacent settings? There have been ongoing conversations about increasing the availability of useful resources for the rainbow/purple OSR discord server, both to help onboard people and to act as repositories of knowledge. A recent question in the server about favorite OSR settings spurred some discussion and a nice little starting list. At a suggestion from another community member, I collated the settings and added some of my own ideas (if you just want the list and don’t want to be subjected to my ramblings about the formation of it, head to the bottom of the post).

Of course nothing is ever simple with TTRPGs - just ask someone to define OSR, whether systems matter, or whether variable weapon damage is the true way (it’s not). Predictably, curating the list sent me down a rabbit hole of questions and categorization. I started with asking myself: what is enough to qualify as a setting for this list? How much detail should the materials have? How big is big enough and when does something cross the line from a single location to a full-throated setting?

View comments August 21, 2024

Megadungeon Monday (On a Tuesday!): Roslof’s Keep Folios 1, 1.5, 2, and 2.5

I’ve joined a small megadungeon book club on the rainbow/purple OSR server. The crux of the club is that we read through a megadungeon in sections, then discuss and post our thoughts on Monday (I’m a bit late for this week, when Folio 2 was due). The group just started a new dungeon, Roslof’s Keep. The first part of this module was published back in 2015 and is dual statted for 1e and 5e. It’s broken up into a series of folios that cover different levels of the dungeon (and some non-dungeon material as well, it seems).

Dolmenwood Session 46

The party concludes their journey by fairy barge, finding some interesting things along the way before running headlong into a dangerous situation. This is likely the last of the travelogue sessions for some time, as the barge has insulated the party from things pretty effectively and allowed them to map out a decent little chunk of the wood.

The Godbird

The shepherd pushed through the trees, drawn by the plaintive bleating of the missing sheep, and stopped short at the edge of the small clearing. An intricate structure of bone and webbing greeted her eyes, a skeletal basket basket the size of a house adorned with carefully placed flowers. The vivid oranges and purples and yellows of the floral decorations popping against the stark ivory receptacle.

Dolmenwood Session 45

Only one session behind in my write-ups after this! The latter half of the group’s fairy barge trip up North ends up more like a sight-seeing travelogue as the group takes advantage of the relative safety of the Blackbird Queen’s barge and notates strange sights on their map during travel.

Dolmenwood Sessions 43 and 44

As I try to catch up to our current sessions, I’ve once again condensed multiple session reports into one post. Once I catch up, I plan to let the session reports breathe a bit more and get into behind the scenes stuff such as procedures and GM decision-making.