Silent Gardens Adventure

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Empty Rooms Should be Just That and the 5 Room Dungeon

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Just a quick explanation of an OSR dungeon design principle for those unfamiliar. This is maybe not a well-touted idea, but I've been brewing on this idea lately. Of course, this is all centered around how I want to play, run... etc... Take with coarse grained salt if you think your goals are different. If you've got a dungeon, you should have some empty rooms that don't.... do anything. As in, there is nothing 'to do' in the room. I have been brewing this idea based on what Luke Gearing said in his interview on the "Into the Megadungeon" podcast. I'll just rehash what Luke conveyed in my listening: Empty rooms provide a place to rest (my words) Empty rooms give space to a dungeon so that you don't die at every turn Empty rooms are tactically important for managing encounters, especially in conjunction with loops   Luke gave an easy example of how to utilize empty rooms: You pass through some empty rooms, and eventually encounter a big room with a ...
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Rolling in OSR is an Encounter Story Prompt

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I posted on tumblr recently about an epiphany I had with regards to dice in the OSR. I'll quote my original text here (with some editing notes): I think I get one of the roles dice play in OSR games, that I didn’t get before. I used to think dice were for randomly deciding between things a human  [at the table] couldn’t fictionally determine, or it would be wrong for one to do so: e.g. does an attack hit in combat? Hard to say in the fiction if all that is said is “I swing my sword” and not super fair for any one person (GM or player) to simply declare. I though this philosophy was also valid for random encounters, reaction rolls, open door checks… but I think there’s something else dice can do. I re-read this blog post , this one too , and watched this Bandit’s Keep video . The first discusses “the oracular power of dice,” th...
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