Advanced Old School Revival - Latest Changes

Making Daredevils Less Cool to Make Everyone More Cool

OSR+ — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 07:34:55 +0000

In this latest revision, we've taken a little bit away from Daredevils to give a whole lot to everyone else.

Some History First

Originally, I created stances as an attempt to solve for the disparity in ability between martials and spellcasters. That is, prior to stances (and deeds), martials didn't have a lot of defined abilities, whereas spellcasters got all these neat things to do through their spells.
However, the real solution to that problem ended up being the introduction of deeds.

But I soon realized that stances solved for a different problem entirely: they enable players to fine-tune their character concepts with even more modularity than the system originally allowed. If you have two Bards with the Swashbuckler kit, for example, but one is a lover and the other is a swordsman, maybe one Bard takes Sex Appeal and the other takes Bonus Parry. The idea here is that the introduction of the stance allows the player to tweak their character concept just a tad bit more out the gate. I developed each stance after the model laid out in AD&D Second Edition Skills & Powers, which sought to modularize all the abilities spread across the many variants of classes, that in later editions would become bastardized into feats: Stances are not simply mechanical perks; they're fragments of character concepts that can be mix and matched with classes and kits to extend their fictional value (the animal-friendly Ranger, or the Barbarian who can't get drunk, etc). I still maintain that 2e's efforts here weren't intended to usher in the era of button-pushing on your sheet; but rather to modularize, so that people could better equip their characters in the fiction. (Things just went sideways after Wizards of the Coast took over... but I digress.) On balance: stances were meant to make your hero able to do things that have to do with their concept more easily than other heroes. A hero with the Expert Disguise stance more easily creates disguises than one without the stance, even though any hero can attempt to create a disguise.

On to the Revision

We originally gated stances behind a level up—you get your first at level 2—in an effort to give the Daredevil, a class unique to OSR+, more oomph, as we noticed in early playtesting they were often ignore over the classic classes. But it's become clear now that the Daredevil has too much oomph, because having a stance at 1st level, coupled with a bonus fate point and their open-ended ability to give non-combat rolls advantage, often makes them more attractive than other classes. But not necessarily because those choices are optimal, but because players can't always achieve their character concept without reaching for a stance at 1st level. For these reasons, all classes can now choose a stance at first level, which means that unique advantage has been taken away from the Daredevil. (They can still switch passive stances without spending MP, however.) We believe this will encourage more diversity of characters, since now players can to use their class, kit, and stance as fundamental "levers" for designing their character concept at level 1, in addition to tweaking their attributes and choosing skills.

Revisions to Divine Maleficence

OSR+ — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 03:49:40 +0000

To align with the new boons and banes rules in the upcoming bestiary, the Divine maleficence has been revised as follows:

This maleficence does an extra 2 damage to Undead, Eldritch, and Astral monsters opposed to your faith, and rolls involving your maleficence made against such monsters have advantage. If this maleficence would deal zero damage, the victim is frightened until after its next action.

The intent here is to grant wielders of this maleficence the exploits reaction versus a broader variety of monster types, as well as balance the amount of damage the maleficence does out the gate against those monster types.

New Kit Changes for Precog, Monster Hunter, Sorcerer, and Avenger

OSR+ — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 03:00:15 +0000

In the interest of ensuring each kit is narratively flexible, we've made some adjustments to some under-used kits.

Precog

Instead of juggling dice to simulate the Precog's ability to see into the future, the kit now allows players to create narrative advantage on the same basis:

You were born with a gift that allows you brief glimpses into the future. You may spend MP to create narrative advantage in the present based on having foreseen events in the future (with the GM's discretion). For 1 MP, you see moments into the future (same round). For 2 MP, you see minutes into the future (rounds). For 3 MP, you see hours into the future (outside the scene). From a player perspective, treat this ability as you having acted upon knowledge now that you gained from an equivalent amount of time in the fiction's past. As long as you have MP, you have the skill Perception.

Monster Hunter

Given the bestiary rules, the Monster Hunter needed an overhaul to take advantage:

You have trained for many years in pursuit of the beast. If you spend a round concentrating on a monster (or evidence of its behavior), you may determine its monster type without making a check (at the discretion of the GM). As a bonus action, you may spend 1 MP to discern a monster's abilities, revealing a single boon or bane (if the monster has no boons or banes, the GM may provide information about the monster). You may also spend MP to create monster-hunting typed supply: 1 MP for consumable, 3 for cheap, and 5 for luxury. Supply created in this way has no resale value, but may be declared as weapons (for example: a silver bullet, a gold crucifix, a wooden stake).

Sorcerer

The Sorcerer needs some oomph, given that all he got was an extra maleficence and a specialty for Elemental spells. He can now "mana burn" for extra MP:

The source of your magic is weird, dangerous, or untamed... and anything but academic. Choose a second maleficence different than your first. You may make a maleficence attack as a bonus action in the round with either of your maleficences, at disadvantage. As an action, you may mana burn yourself to deal 1 HP damage and recover 3 MP. HP damaged caused by mana burn cannot be prevented by any means, and HP lost by mana burn cannot be recovered except by resting. Elemental spell checks explode on a 5 or a 6.

Avenger

Finally, the Avenger was made to emulate characters like Buffy from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who can take a beating and is especially strong against her sworn enemy (in her case, vampires). We now allow the Avenger access to legendary actions against her sworn enemy in addition to legendary resistance, per the new bestiary rules. In essence, she becomes a legendary creature against her sworn enemy!

You have been trained as a weapon for a cause. You must name a specific faction or group (such as adherents of a particular religion or ideology, or specific monster) as your sworn enemy. You gain legendary resistance against your sworn enemy, and each scene, you may take 1 legendary action per 3 levels of experience (rounded down) against them. For 2 MP, you may negate 2 points from any single source of damage. Damage negated in this way stacks with your other source(s) of soak.

Hope you enjoy these new, revised kits!

Introducing New Monster Mechanics

OSR+ — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 01:21:09 +0000

What better way to celebrate Christmas than to introduce some cutting edge new mechanics, fresh from the upcoming OSR+ Bestiary! Note: These mechanics are still undergoing testing, but derive from the upcoming Bestiary, which features 300+ monsters and hundreds of new abilities unique to monsters. Okay, here's the skinny:

Banes & Boons

We use banes and boons instead of the "resistances" and "immunities" that appear in traditional RPGs to ensure that something always happens in the fiction even when a PC's efforts are thwarted by the monster's passive abilities. A dragon may be totally immune to fire, but what happens when someone tries to hit it with a fire-based attack? We could say that nothing happens, but that's not interesting, and it's often frustrating for the player to waste their turn in this way. Instead, we could say that a fire attack taunts the dragon, because the monster is amused that the puny adventurer dares to attack it with the one element it's totally immune to: the taunts reaction would then force the dragon to spend its next action targeting that puny adventurer. In effect, the PC's attack was ineffective, but the state of the fiction changed, because now the dragon is focused on the PC.

Monster Reactions

When a monster is subject to a peril of a particular type, it automatically responds with one of 12 standard reactions. These reactions describe what happens either:

When the monster is subject to the peril, or:
Instead of the monster being subject to the peril.

Using our fire dragon example above, we might say: Fire ... to indicate that the monster is taunted by fire.

Monster Phases

Phases are actions that get automatically triggered when a monster has a certain status effect. A phase always specifies a condition and an ability that triggers on that condition. For example:

Rage (Bloodied). The monster enters a berserker rage, which lasts for the duration of the scene. While enraged, if damage would kill the monster, the monster makes an escalating Mighty check (TN 11) to remain conscious. While berserk, the monster will not stop attacking its foes, even if its life is in danger, and the berserker rage will only end when the final foe falls. Enraged monsters have disadvantage on Deft and defense checks.

Monster phases allow you to build more engaging, unpredictable boss fights!

Homebrew Rules

You can see the exact calculus for making your own monsters in the Game Master's Guide.

Revised NPC Shorthand

You will find a fully revised NPC shorthand that incorporates these new rules.

Chronomancer Revisions

OSR+ — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 02:01:32 +0000

Given the new initiative rules, the Chronomancer has been revised to be more versatile. Previously, the Chronomancer kit allowed the hero to act on any initiative, and granted exploding dice on a 5 or 6 for Time spells. The Chronomancer has been revised to allow for the following:

For you, time is just another force of nature to be manipulated by magic. You may use your maleficence to alter the flow of time, with the GM’s discretion. As examples: create a temporal anchor that holds a door shut through your concentration, apply the Held status by touch to a mundane object for a round, or slow the hail of an arrow mid-flight, conferring the victim a momentary soak. As long as you have MP, you always know the exact time of day, how much time has passed in a scene, and whether anything in the scene is out of sequence. Time spells explode on a 5 or 6.

The new kit requires the hero to have a maleficence in order for it to be enhanced by its temporal abilities.

Revisiting Initiative in OSR+

OSR+ — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 17:06:57 +0000

There's always been a tension in system design between quick, fluid action in play and immersive, tactical depth. This is because the more crunch we add in order to better simulate what's going on in the fiction, the more time it takes to resolve that crunch, which may in the end have the opposite effect than intended. Classic initiative order, where each of us rolls to see who goes first, is the simplest response to designing around the bottleneck that arises in any RPG that has a GM: that is, the GM can only put one person in the spotlight at a time, and as a consequence can only resolve one PC's actions at a time, because the nature of the RPG is a conversation with a natural back and forth. We can't talk over each other, and we can't have multiple spotlights without multiple GMs.

Design Principles

After some playtesting, we've landed on a middle ground that's a balance between tactical play and fluidity. These were our goals in redesigning initiative for OSR+:

Run initiative faster, while preserving the system's tactical depth of reactions and bonus actions;
Preserve the immersive chaos of battle. We want initiative order to change from round to round, based on a randomizer that's augmented by abilities the PCs may have;
Respect the fiction first. Action order should be dictated by what happens in the fiction, not by an arbitrary turn sequencing, lopsided "side-based" initiative, or non-diegetic solutions such as "popcorn" initiative that allows players to arbitrarily choose who goes next. Therefore, when players react to other players should be dictated by what makes sense fictionally;
Eliminate waiting for holds, while privileging high rollers. PCs who roll high on initiative should be able to see what people are doing before they act because they're reacting quicker than their opponents. But we don't want to have to keep circling back on initiative to pick up PCs who held their turn;
Avoid GM fiat in turn order. We don't want to resort to the GM arbitrarily managing the spotlight based on vibes or based on whoever is fastest to act out-of-character;
Enforce clarity and be manageable for the GM, such that turn order can be managed easily by the GM or a caller and in such a way that clearly indicates who has acted and who acts next. We don't want complex trackers or resource pools;
No beat counts, timers, or "speak quickly or you lose your turn" that puts pressure on players to act;
Initiative never stalls, such that there is a mechanism to force the round to continue moving, if PCs or NPCs are at a standstill.

The New Initiative Rules

So, given all that, we've landed on a slight modification to initiative that involves the introduction of chain reactions and the ability for anyone to act in any order:

Roll initiative. Everyone rolls a d6 the start of a round, adding a +2 if they have the Perception skill. The GM or the Caller writes down everyone's initiative, which represents the fastest they can act in the round.
Start a chain reaction. Anyone can start a chain reaction, which is a sequence of fictionally related actions.
GM resolution. If no one intervenes with a higher initiative, then the PC who started the chain reaction gets resolved first. If higher initiative players intervene, then the spotlight moves to them, and their action is resolved first, before the spotlight returns to the player who started the chain reaction.

And two key rules:

If no one starts a chain reaction, then the person with the lowest initiative must act next.
You can only join a chain reaction if your action is fictionally related to what the player who kicked things off is doing, even if you have the initiative.
PCs are not committed to their action until the spotlight returns to them and the GM begins resolving their action. So if someone interrupts you and the situation has changed, you can change your action when the spotlight returns to you.

Introducing MergrimAI!

OSR+ — Sat, 31 May 2025 00:21:56 +0000

I spent the day noodling with RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) mechanisms to create MergrimAI, an LLM that is able to act as your remote game master. MergrimAI can look up information from the core rules and the game master's guide, on demand. You can ask MergrimAI about any rules context, from game mastery to specific abilities to overworld play and airships. Some tips for MergrimAI: always pick the right context before querying. All the system's abilities (such as spells, tactics, status effects, archetypes, etc) exist in the "Reference Tables" context, so if you ask MergrimAI to tell you the text for the spell Overgrowth and you don't have that context selected, he won't be able to find it! You can set the context with the context dropdown. Also, keep in mind that while we've done our best to minimize Mergrim's capacity to hallucinate, he still will. He's only artificially generated, after all. Always verify the core rules on the site if your ruling is super important to get right!

Making the Acid Maleficence Scarier

OSR+ — Fri, 23 May 2025 15:57:06 +0000

To make the Acid maleficence more fearsome as a maleficence, and to distinguish its ability to bypass soak from the Piercing tactic, the Acid maleficence now also has the potential to destroy items.

Damage caused by this maleficence ignores soak conferred by armor. Additionally, a successful hit with the maleficence destroys a supply (or equivalent declared item of the victim's choice): on 1-3) consumable, 4-5) cheap, 6) luxury. If a specific weapon, shield, or other mundane object is the target of the maleficence, the victim must make a spell check vs. your attack roll, or else the item is destroyed. (Entire suits of armor cannot be destroyed by acid in this way.)

Under these new rules, treasures are functionally immune to being destroyed by acid.

Revisiting NPCs as Story Tags

OSR+ — Thu, 22 May 2025 20:21:09 +0000

NPCs in OSR+ are treated as global story tags in conjunction with rules in the Game Master's Guide in order to simplify encounters. This has worked great in playtesting over the years, but the system did not prescribe how to handle NPCs engaging other NPCs, such as when a BBEG or other narratively important character attempts to harm an NPC on the party (or vice versa). The newly revised and expanded NPCs as Story Tags rules handle these scenarios with NPC clocks and rules of engagement. Furthermore, we've added a page that outlines clocks vs. hold and those definitions in the system.

Luxury-as-Potions Optional Rules

OSR+ — Wed, 14 May 2025 21:11:48 +0000

The core rules mentions an optional rule that outlines how to declare luxury as potions:

As an optional rule, you can declare a luxury supply as a consumable potion. Such a potion can restore 1d6 MP or HP, or cure a minor peril.

The core rules now expand upon this rule to offer GMs multiple ways to approach this optional rule, depending on the needs of their campaign setting, including:

Unlimited Luxury-as-Potions
Fatigue-Limited Luxury-as-Potions
Diminishing-Return Luxury-as-Potions
Narratively-Limited Luxury-as-Potions
Rest-Limited Luxury-as-Potions

Revised Wizard and Chaos Mage Kits

OSR+ — Thu, 01 May 2025 21:08:32 +0000

The Wizard and Chaos Mage kits have been revised to make them more versatile. Previously, Wizards could scribe scrolls from a school of magic they chose at character creation. While this is still the case, Wizards can now replace all the spells they know with different spells upon resting, by spending 1 MP per spell to replace before resting. This is a callback to the Vancian wizard class in other traditional RPGs, where some spellcasters memorized spells and could choose new ones as they adventured.

You are a living font of knowledge: before you rest, you may spend 1 MP to replace any spell you've learned with a different spell of your choosing. You know the new spells until you choose to replace them the next time you rest. When you adopt this kit, choose a school of magic. You may spend a consumable supply to scribe a scroll that contains a spell from the chosen school of magic. It takes an hour to scribe a scroll, and anyone who reads your scrolls can cast the spell contained therein. You may choose to make a scroll indecipherable except to those with an Arcana skill you know. The reader of the scroll must expend MP to cast the spell at the time the scroll is read, and the scroll is consumed after the spell is cast. Spells cast from your chosen school explode on a 5 or 6.

Similarly, the Chaos Mage kit has been revised for utility. Instead of a chaos surge occurring unless the player rolls exactly a clean success, it now occurs depending on how powerful is the spell they've cast, based on a "probability die."

You experiment with raw, primordial magic, which is as unpredictable as it is powerful. You may choose to cast any spell you have not learned, but if you do, roll a Probability Die to determine if a chaos surge occurs. If you spent 1 MP to cast the spell, the surge occurs on a 1 or 2; if you spent 2 MP, on 1, 2, or 3; if you spent 3, on a 1, 2, 3, or 4. The chaos surge affects an encounter space, as determined by the GM. Roll a d6: on a 1, there is collateral damage; on a 2, your spell has unintended targets; on a 3, something is gained and something is lost; on a 4, there is a transformation or reversal; on a 5, the spell is out of control; on a 6, the spell costs twice as much to cast. Probability spell checks explode on a 5 or a 6.

The intent of this revision is to make the Chaos Mage's central feature (plucking spells out of thin air with abandon) a little more enjoyable for the player.

Custom Notes & Magical Strength for Treasures

OSR+ — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 19:40:45 +0000

It is now possible to save the magical strength of a treasure, and add personal notes to the item: You can also add notes to mundane weapons as well. This information is visible in any tooltip mouseover on your sheet.

New Beta Status Effects Revisions

OSR+ — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 03:36:44 +0000

OSR+ has a number of status effects that are conferred by various perils and abilities. Outside of spells or spell-like effects, status effects tend to end after the victim's next turn. There were a couple narrative reasons why the effects have this limited duration:

Before this revision, some effects forced you to take specific action (e.g., if you were entangled, you were forced to break free; if you were stunned, your actions were limited to defensive action). Limiting the duration of these statuses kept players from being effectively taken out of the game for no longer than one turn.
We didn't want the system to force you to track multiple status effects over time, as it's not in the spirit of the game to hamper players or the GM with too many numbers.

After years of testing, however, it's become clear that status effects that take you completely out of the game just aren't fun. Nobody wants to sit and twiddle their thumbs as the rest of the table gets to continue to play, just because they're stunned. After all, why would a game include in its mechanics the rule that you can't play (for any length of time?). Add to this, as a GM, I tend to avoid inflicting PCs with status effects for this exact reason, and the result is that I'm deliberately ignoring a large part of the tactics available in the game. That being said, some of these statuses must exist in order to simulate the fiction immersively. PCs will go unconscious. You have to be able to knock someone out. These are things you can do in real life, and it would stretch credulity to avoid simulating what those effects do. Therefore in this status effect revision, we've made it such that no effect forces you to take any particular action; effects just describe what you can't do. For example, if you have the held status effect (say as a result of being subject to a time spell), you could still potentially cast Dispel Magic on yourself (as a psychic), because psychics don't have somatic or semantic components to their spells. Similarly, the revised stunned status effect rules allow PCs to continue to act as normal, they just suffer a d6 malus as long as they're stunned on every roll. The revisions keep players in the game, forcing them to consider alternate approaches to success when the effects rule out the most clear cut ones.

Concerning Legendary Resistance

Mechanically, legendary resistance exists mainly to prevent NPC foes from being "stun-locked," to borrow a term from video games. As originally formulated, legendary resistance was basically the GM's get-out-of-jail-free card against spells like Sleep or tactics like Knockout, that take an NPC out of the game with a single failed roll. D&D approaches this by giving special enemies a number of chances to succeed on a roll even after they fail (or by pairing a long list of invulnerabilities or resistances with a long list of other status effects), but this still allows for the possibility that they may be caught without such bennies available and fall victim to stun-locking anyway. OSR+ corrects for this by having legendary resistance belong only to very special monsters or BBEGs, and having it apply unlimited protection. This revision, however, restricts the benefits legendary resistance provides by describing it mainly as immunity to having one's action be directed or restricted. This allows the GM more latitude to A) rule out stun-locking abilities on a case-by-case basis, and B) fictionalize the resistance in a cinematic way that best suits the fiction.

Partial Recovery of HP & MP

OSR+ — Sun, 04 Aug 2024 18:21:26 +0000

In OSR+, heroes recover 1 HP and all their MP after a full night's rest, but the rules are silent regarding what happens when heroes rest for part of the night. The logical answer is that you recover some fraction of your HP and MP based on how much you sleep, but having any sort of fractional rules in OSR+ runs afoul of the spirit of the game, which values simplicity and on the spot rulings when there are gaps in the rules. A full night’s rest means uninterrupted sleep for 8 hours. If you’re awakened for more than an hour in the middle of resting, you engage in strenuous activity for any length of time after being awakened, or you sleep for less than 8 hours, then you do not regain any HP from resting. The same is true of MP recovery. There is no concept of a “short rest” in OSR+, so splitting up your rest throughout a day or night cannot benefit you, although the GM may permit you to regain HP or MP after an interrupted rest at his discretion.

Monologues & Stun Tactic Revised

OSR+ — Sat, 15 Jun 2024 14:23:23 +0000

The monologue action has been revised to be more beneficial to PCs. Originally, the monologue action required a success check to determine the outcome of the monologue (rolling a clean success resulted in creating a story tag for the player, whereas success at a cost resulted in creating a story tag for the player and a story tag for the GM). Success checks, according to the math, tend to yield success-at-a-cost as an average result, which can result in scenarios where the player may have to expend narrative resources in order to gain the narrative resource a monologue provides. From a system perspective, we want to reward players for doing a monologue in character: there shouldn't be a chance of negative outcomes unless they opt to push their luck (see below). To fix this, we've revised the action such that when you perform a monologue in downtime, you automatically generate a story tag in your favor. You then have the option to push your luck, which means you can make a success check to see how much farther your monologue has impacted the narrative. The gamble here of course is that you might give the GM a tag if you roll poorly:

When a player monologues, they immediately produce a global story tag that they name after the nature of the monologue, without rolling [...] A player may always choose to push their luck after monologing. If they choose to push their luck, they may make a success check with an appropriate attribute and then use the success table from overworld play to adjudicate success. Monologues always either appeal to the audience’s empathy (Deft), their conviction (Mighty), or their reason (Smart). Any story tags created for players as a result of pushing their luck are created in addition to the tag they get for monologuing in the first place.

Stun Tactic

The Stun tactic's wording was unclear such that it might be interpreted to require a check in addition to the initial attack to inflict the stunned status on a victim. This was not the intent of the tactic. When you make an attack and apply the Stun tactic, you're forgoing dealing damage in order to inflict the stunned status on the victim, and the only check involved is the attack roll itself. This tactic has been reworded to better reflect this: You must declare that you're using this tactic and forgo dealing damage before making the attack; success on the attack means your opponent is stunned until after their next action.