A downloadable Guidebook

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Build Worlds, Craft Adventure Scenarios, and Have Fun Running the Game

That's the goal of The Old School Referee, a free handbook filled with simple procedures for Referees new and old. 

If you've never run a Tabletop RPG before, or if you struggle with disorganized or over-bloated prep time, I hope this book can help!

What's Inside?

  • The Essentials of Refereeing: Information, Adjudication, and Neutrality
  • Growing a World from Simple Seeds with Trouble, Treasure, and Faces.
  • Crafting Adventures rooted in Interesting Encounters
  • Advice for Starting a Campaign, Building a Party, and Running the Game
  • Monster Crafting guidelines
  • Easy to Use "Hoard Tables" ranked from 0-5, with 48 Magic Items sorted into 3 tiers
  • Loads of examples
  • Art 100% from the Public Domain
  • Appendix C: 5 Pages of helpful tables for improvisation and inspiration.

How Long Does it Take?

Following the procedures takes about an hour for building a playable world or adventure, focusing on what's near the players. You can always do more, but it shouldn't take a second job to run a game.

A Sample Adventure

If you'd like to see what an adventure created with The Old School Referee could look like, check out Abara Cad Ebra!

Print Copies

Feel free to print your own copy, or buy one thru Lulu.

Free Forever 

To support the development of The Old School Referee and my other games, feel free to donate. Appreciated, but never required, thanks!

Compatibility

The Old School Referee was built for maximum compatibility. The Monster and Treasure sections are the only areas designed for a specific game, Shadow & Fae, and even those should be easily adjustable for most OSR games.

Thanks for Reading, and Happy Gaming!

-Hilander

StatusReleased
CategoryPhysical game
Rating
Rated 5.0 out of 5 stars
(12 total ratings)
AuthorHilander
TagsFantasy, gm, nusr, OSR, referee, Tabletop role-playing game, zine

Download

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Click download now to get access to the following files:

Old School Referee_Pages.pdf 28 MB
Old School Referee_Print Friendly.pdf 8.7 MB
Oldschool Referee (Print Ready) 22 MB

Development log

Comments

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I will be sending it to all my younger friends in the hobby who find GMing arcane and onerous. Just what the doctor ordered.

Mission accomplished.

What a wonderful resource! And I’m only on page 7! (Pro tip: using this guidance with the tables in Knave 2e is a winning combination)

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I haven't checked out Knave 2e yet, but I remember enjoying the first edition.

I absolutely love some good tables, but I often felt like they were supporting an unseen architecture that Referees are just supposed to innately understand.

Old School Ref. is my attempt at making (at least one form of) that architecture tangible. Glad you're finding it helpful!