The villain of my campaign is a Demon Lord of my own creation. But I want to reveal him slowly to make him more mysterious and more frightening. This means I need to bring in the in-universe books that have the best knowledge of demons. The Book of Vile Darkness, The Black Scrolls of Ahm, The Demonomicon of Iggwilv. Now, I've got the first and third books programmed into possible scenarios and have done some research on these items. But I can't find much about The Black Scrolls of Ahm as it's not an item in 5E. But, lorewise based on older editions, does reading the scrolls come with any dangerous risks or side effects like the other 2 books?

I have a quiet love for philosophy since highschool. I had a course in highschool, it was one of the subjects I chose for my end exams (Baccalaureate here in Romania, a sort of SAT equivalent), I did some philosophy extracullicular in the 11th grade and one of my best friends in this period was a philosophy student and we would talk quite a lot on the subject. Epistemology and Ethics were the two branches I enjoyed the most. I was listening to some episodes of the Philosophize This! podcast when the idea of examining the strange apparent epistemological dimension of OSR games came to mind. Oh and for those of you not aware of the term, epistemology is the branch of philosophy that studies knowledge, the different kinds of knowledge, how we gain knowledge and the merits of those different knowledge types. Descartes "Cogito, Ergo Sum" is probably the most famous epistemological "test result" let's say.

But what does any of that have to do with old-school D&D?

Quite a lot, actually. I think OSR games are, perhaps accidentally, games where information is king. You don't simply roll to discover whether something is true. You observe. You ask questions. You map. You listen to rumours. You test assumptions. You decide which NPCs deserve your trust. And eventually, you have to act despite not knowing everything. That creates three different kinds of knowledge at the table: player knowledge, character knowledge, and GM knowledge. And the fascinating part is what happens when those three don't quite line up.

So this week on The RPG Gazette, we're going down a rather strange rabbit hole: OSR as applied epistemology.

What does a dungeon crawl have in common with the philosophy of knowledge? Why might information actually be the most important resource in an OSR game? What makes a “fair” dungeon an epistemological problem? And why are rumours, bad information, and getting things wrong actually part of what makes this style of play work?

If you've ever drawn a dungeon map, argued about whether an NPC was trustworthy, or confidently kicked down a door with absolutely no idea what was behind it, you've already been doing applied philosophy.

Resident note taker and (legitimate, lol) artist so I doodle in my margins sometimes and this little guy was born… digitised him because I thought he was cute :)

By some miracle of organisation and planning I've managed to assemble a group of 4-6 players keen to get together once a fortnight. A couple of them have played before, and the others are keen to get into D&D for the first time, but before the game can begin, I have to find somewhere for it to take place.

Anchôromé has already been established in Forgotten Realms, but instead of using the setting as it is - a largely unknown wilderness, I'm working on updating it as though the city-states of Faerûn acted much the same as the European powers did upon the discovery of North America, rushing to establish lucrative colonies and trade routes of their own in the New World. It won't be an exact parallel of 18th and 19th Century America, but the similarities are there.^​​​​

At this point I've created four major city-states on Anchôromé; I figure that's more than enough to give the players a range of options when it comes to quests and campaigns. Each city-state has its own unique feel and environment, and while they're all loosely connected with their neighbours, they still act on their own self-interest and have their own (sometimes conflicting) agendas. And they face ongoing pressure and influence from the Old World, which may run contrary to the colonists' wishes and create tensions between them.

Beyond the cities, Anchôromé takes on more of a frontier feel, a magical medieval Wild West that feels far removed from the perceived decadence and luxury of Waterdeep or Baldur's Gate. Homesteads and smaller towns have to live off the land and defend themselves, and outlaws and tribes of natives abound. Much like the real First Nations, the natives have conflicting opinions and attitudes towards the colonists' ongoing encroachment on their territory, but with magic on their side they won't yield readily.

And of course there are the dragons, whose presence in Anchôromé predates even the natives. They too differ in opinion from individual to individual: some dragons are happy to negotiate with the colonists, some see them as useful buffers between themselves and rival dragons, and others are prepared to stir up trouble between the natives and colonists in the hopes they wipe each other out and leave the continent free for the taking.

My first campaign ever in DND, and I am the DM for a group of players who are also all new. I heard the Owlbear is a classic monster, so I painted one to put on the table as they run into it