Leyline Press Blog — dnd

This blog follows our previous discussion of some tenents of 'old school' RPG play. We are now going to explore the various 'OSR' systems on the tabletop RPG market. To begin we're taking a look at Old School Essentials (OSE) by Necrotic Gnome.

Old School Essentials is a retroclone of the Basic & Expert D&D Rules by Tom Moldvay, published in 1981. These rules were a revision of Holmes Basic and intended to introduce D&D to new players. 

This is the introduction to a series of articles that will comparatively explore the slew of tabletop roleplaying games that have spawned from old school gaming movement. This is often known as the 'OSR' which means 'Old School Revival' or 'Old School Renaissance.'  This article will be discussing some of the key design principles that tie these many varied games together.

These roleplaying games are ostensibly inspired by the original versions of D&D such as original D&D, the Basic & Expert line of D&D as well as AD&D. You can read more about those here. 

In this series of articles we'll  be exploring the differences and similarities between every edition of Dungeons and Dragons. In the last article we looked at AD&D which you can read here. In this article we look at AD&D 2E. Launched in 1989, AD&D 2E was designed to consolidate the vast range of AD&D content in a brand new edition of the game. It was worked on by a team of designers at TSR led by David Cook and aimed to be compatible with AD&D whilst advancing further on the rules. It was published in the form of the Players...

  In this series of articles we'll  be exploring the differences and similarities between every edition of Dungeons and Dragons. In the last article we looked at Basic & Expert D&D. In this article we are looking at BECMI launched in 1983. BECMI, compiled by Frank Mentzer and published from 1983 - 1986 is the ‘newest’ edition of the ‘Basic’ series of D&D rules. It’s named BECMI as it includes 5 separate sets. ‘Basic’, ‘Expert’, ‘Companion’, ‘Masters’ and ‘Immortal’  Basic & Expert would be further revised editions of the Moldvay Basic and Expert rules. The Basic Set would be split into a...

In this series of articles we'll  be exploring the differences and similarities between every edition of Dungeons and Dragons.

In the last article we looked at Holmes Basic. 

In this article we are looking at Basic & Expert D&D launched in 1981.