How to Run Your First OSR Campaign if You're Coming From One D&D | 5e | 5.5 | 6e

The way to do sandbox is to ask the players at the end of each session what they plan to do next session.

Another great part of the OSR is how inexpensive many OSR games are, many are free.

My group never bought modules, so the published adventures never really gave us the direction for how it was supposed to be played. It was 90s for us, not the 80s so the Gazeteer series was a big influence on us. Lots of hex crawling with delving into ruins we'd find along the way. Exploration was the main thing. Our hex map was blank at the start of the campaign and we'd filled the thing in with colored pencil a couple years later and it felt good.

Props to mentioning both Peter Zeihan and Baron de Ropp. 👍

My B/X and AD&D games were sandbox, I used B2 as a starting point.

T1Village of Homlet continues to inspire me. There are so many good stories to explore outside of what the module focuses on. For example I recently ran a murder mystery involving a setting very like Homlet. By adding a dead messenger and letting the players "discover" the body, they were instantly "hooked" and started investigating without being hired by anyone. Victim, culprit, motive, this is all you really need for an evening or two of fun. By the time the players solve the mystery, other potential challenges will have presented themselves.

My return to DMing I gave the players their binding background that they met in the military and one moved to a village to be its blacksmith. He had a letter written (he can’t read or write) to his buddies to come help rescue the daughter of a beloved farmer who was kidnapped. I had an idea of what the kidnappers wanted and that was about it. It became a full blown adventure for two years just in the surrounding community and still more to come. And it took little effort.

I just ordered the entire catalog of Old School Essentials material, I plan on converting my D&D5e group over to OSR. You are one of the first people I watched on this subject, thanks!

Gygax had advice to just pick options that made sense. Pick the monster, pick the treasure. It was always supposed to be a mix. The random tables was there for when you didn’t have time or the cart went off the track. The west marches game needs a lot of competing players to work how communicated. You make options that aren’t flesh out and are basically just hooks. Then the players would plan expeditions and the DM set a date with enough time to prepare. Part of it was competition to get to the dungeons first. It doesn’t translate to a four person party the same way. The west marches DM was servicing many players. I don’t think it matters how big of a town you pick really. Most of it comes down to the descriptions and narration. You’d make about the same number of PC’s. You might know everyone in a small town but you can’t know everyone in the city. You know just the people around you. You can make the very same list of important people. The trick is it might just be a neighborhood. I honestly you included too much stuff. You need a starting safe place and a place to adventure. I would agree you should eventually have everything mentioned but you don’t have to start there. I think it’s fine to have a smaller scope. Generally you get a good idea of the direction of the party and can plan out in the direction they’re headed. If they’re headed abroad, you detail neighboring countries. If they’re sticking to the city, you detail more NPC’s and city locations. Gygax suggested you have the next dungeon level prepared for the party so they can head lower if they need. He also suggested a changing map or things that would take work to remove like a cave in blocking progress. Similar things could be used in non dungeon settings. I think there’s one thing I like about old school play that isn’t mentioned much. It’s that players set the difficulty and choose the risk they want to accept. It’s a feature of exp for gold. Since treasure is the motivation, you can risk going deeper in the dungeon for a bigger payout. Do you keep exploring just a bit more hoping to find treasure when you’re low on resources or cut and run to heal up and have to fight your way back through? I think you can get a player picked difficulty other ways but I haven’t heard a good alternative. It’s true higher level monsters give more exp in later editions. However, in earlier exp for gold systems you could avoid the monsters and score the treasure. Letting you risk deadly encounters you’d have to run from to find lucrative treasure.

Hi Joe, I just discovered your channel and am quite enjoying it. I'm also an OG, and played my first D&D game in '80 or '81 (memory fades), but veered off into other genres and systems before finally returning to my first love during the pandemic (and finally dragging my similarly long-toothed group into the 21st century and the wonders of VTTs). Anyway, I just wanted to do my part for the algorithm and express my appreciation for repping us old-timers on the YouTubes. Cheers!

Brother you nailed it. You described exactly what I’ve been doing - much more eloquently than I could. Keep up the content!

You note in your video that if you didn't go to conventions you just played with your own little group. I guess I was lucky growing up in Southern California in the 1960s to 1980s that we had multiple of game shops as well where we gamed. So our little groups weren't all that little. Sure I had some junior high and high school groups that formed into friendships. I also had groups who formed from those game shops and there was melding between the various groups and meeting new people. Plus the college groups and soon after for me the groups I joined or formed during the long period I spent in the military. Plus all the varied ttrpg magazines from the 1970s onward that I read which also informed how we played or gave us new ideas. Then, as you mentioned were conventions of various sizes which impacted on sharing gaming experiences and what we knew or learned etc. I frequently find that people who weren't there or who were but had a narrow experience coming off as quite definitive as to what was an what wasn't. Any anyone who offers different is told they are wrong. I gotta admit that it's been a bit frustrating to run across on forums, YouTube, Reddit, Discord etc. Anyhow, the late great Greg Stafford was never a dull person to listen to or read gaming opinions, experience etc from. So I'm always glad to see him get a mention and recognition. Anyhow, I ended going off on a rambling rant, sorry about that. interesting video, I love listening to others take on running and playing ttrpgs even if I don't always agree. Edit: Forgot to mention, some really good advice in the video, good stuff for new players/GMs.

The biggest OSR myth is that we used to avoid combat back in the day. Maybe some groups did but mine didn’t. We brawled.

Truly inspiring (independent of the OSR byline). Great tips on RPG adventure and fostering role-play mentality. Whirlwind introduction to world-building basics, leveraging what you’ve got. Great sample maps without overdoing it. Love the tips on making a mega-dungeon into “a living, breathing environment” (@25min). Oodles of GM wisdom. Well done and… TY!

Really inspiring video! Made me want to gi and get to work. Kinda had to hit pause after you talked about designing a starter village. I wanna make sure I master the foundational aspects first. Keep up the good work!

Really helpful advice, thank you. I’ve had a lot of success running sci-fi campaigns and making the setting feel vibrant and alive, but having a hard time transferring that over to a fantasy system. When you said that dungeons are there but not the focus it really clicked together for me.

Back in the day we used to run campaigns based on Fantasy novels we read. Usually we would read the same books so we all knew the the world history, setting etc. and those worked out real well. I read everything Conan all the novels plus Savage sword of Conan the old magazine sized black & white comics. YES! The rules always felt sketchy and we were never sure if we were playing it completely right but we had a blast for years. Good times!

Lots of great ideas in here. I've been thinking about "time passage" in game and this gives me some ideas. Great advice on the "townies" too.

I have a campaign Sandbox I have been running for 21 years, the most recent campaign is 4 years old, I started everyone out Elderscrolls style, amnesia, slaves in a cage, no equipment. They escape and build lives, trying to figure out what happened to them and why they were enslaves, uncovering large plots, and so on, in the mean time, every quest they do, large and small effect everything. I track all their relevant actions and how they solve problems, some of their characters have even become villains as a result of consequences over time. As an example, one character makes a deal with an Efreet for it to destroy an undead horde the party released when they were tomb robbing. The deal was that if he did, the Efreet could use the characters body as his holding vessel so he was no longer bound to his Mausoleum. Overtime the characters soul becomes corrupted and his body becomes fiendish, he eventually fails enough saves over the course of 2 years of the campaign (7 years in game later) that I take his character sheet and he tries to kill the party. I always make sure there are long term consequences for all major actions, and make sure there is a rolling cast of characters they have to choose from (I also have a large 9 player group). Right now, 4 years in, the game timeline is 25 years later, and the party is hunting down some of the old characters from earlier on, as well as some of their equipment, in order to resolve some of the plot hooks they created by accident. Some of the older characters are retired, some are running a guild they started and are expanding it, and one has become a King of a nation they helped found. But it all started with them as slaves in a cage, and was a long burn toward greatness.

Cannot wait to hear about your Grim-Dark campaign. Thanks for making this video for there are terrific nuggets throughout. As I have grown tired of the ultimate never can die hero mentality and I will adopt “No bodies from no where”. This has been very helpful with ideas to begin world building