Okay, so I'm pretty much down to the "Advice" part of the system where most of the rules are already laid out and I just try to give Old School Hack DMs some thoughts on how to run the game. Since I've got limited space in my layout and I don't have a whole lot in my notes to work from I figured I'd just start a thread with some stream-of-thought ideas and throw them at you guys and pick and choose later what I feel are the salient points to plug back into the official rules.

I feel like we're also reaching a threshold where we've got people interested in running OSH games just around the corner here that haven't actually been exposed yet to someone who's seen me run a game, which is a pretty important point for the game's development and which I hope will give us a nice new influx of feedback from people approaching the ruleset a lot more objectively. But to better facilitate those games, please feel free to use this advice thread to throw some questions back at me.

Okay.

So.

Most anybody who's going to run OSH in the near future here has run and created adventures before and knows the basic stuff. Old School Hack exists unapologetically in the D&D universe, with the heroes taking the classic class archetypes, and going and exploring dangerous places and fighting monsters in order to get cool stuff and become more powerful. You don't have to meet in a tavern, form a party, hear a rumor, and head out to fight evil, but it's definitely set in the kind of world where exactly that kind of stuff happens all the time. ;)

To play to the game's strengths, when planning ahead for a session I just try to think of a single thing that's big and cool, a place, an item, or a monster, something that feels big and evocative and I can build a whole encounter just around the idea. I don't worry about the getting there because we've got a whole big bag of fantasy clichés that can easily be plugged in to fill in the details. Here are some of these kinds of ideas that have shown up in Old School Hack games I've run:

• An attack on a floating caravan by bandits on wasps in the middle of some badlands desert.
• A massive underground cavern so large and bottomless that it's only the massive spiderwebs and ancient chains that hold large pieces of rocks in place.
• A humongous cloud whale used as a floating castle by a malevolent empire docked at a tower over the town it's occupying.
• A narrow bridge in front of an underground waterfall that provides the only chokepoint against an invading army, and the secret temple entrance under the rushing water.
• A goblin tribe engaged in a malevolent demon-summoning ritual in a hidden canyon, summoning an amorphous blob that's nothing but mouths and daggers.

Let's call this the "setpiece" encounter. It's going to be the one chokepoint in the entire session that you know the players are going to be involved in, that whatever they want, they have to get past this encounter to get to.

I picture the environment of the encounter, and try to make it as broad as possible. Old School Hack is all about moving from one Arena to another as you fight, it's a combat system that's supposed to encourage a certain amount of traveling here and there, back and forth, voluntary or no, so this encounter should encompass a variety of different Arena types (no less than four or five is good). I find it helps to think three-dimensionally, and of course anyone appreciative of pulpy tropes knows that High Shit You Can Fall Off Of always translates to MORE EXCITING!

Let's look at the Arena types:

• Tight Arenas - Narrow corridors, stairwells, thin ledges, doorways, etc.
• Hazardous Arenas - Crumbly rooftops, pits of lava, thin ledges over precipices, spiky areas, poor visibility, etc.
• Open Arenas - The sky (always), the open floor (what you fall onto from the Hazardous Arena), the grand chamber, and so on
• Dense Arenas - The crowded shop, the thick forest, the thatch village, the store-room, you get the idea.
• Neutral Arena - The I-can't-think-of-what-arena-this-is-Arena.

So we can come up with a rough map of our encounter, and the "rough map" can literally just be labeled circles with lines connecting to each other as clusters or linearly. Don't be afraid to repeat Arena types as makes sense for your environment "theme" but do try to break them up with other types in between. You can also start to keep in mind the relationships between the different Arenas at this point as well, which can be directional: falling off one Arena to another might be easy, climbing back might be trickier. Arenas don't have to be stationary either - elevators can move up and down, ships can be racing alongside each other, cool stuff like that. The map doesn't necessarily need to be totally locked down, often times I just have a main area firmly established in my head but leave it's peripheral surroundings to be made up on the fly as needed later - you can leave room for the environment to "evolve" as the situation changes, or sometimes even plan for that (halfway through the encounter the cavern will start to collapse), and definitely leave room for players to suggest arenas as well. But really we've just essentially built a whole little mini-"dungeon" (in the abstract tabletop sense of the word, not the literal) designed around the premise of a single but fairly complicated and hopefully exciting setpiece encounter.

You should have more than one wave of bad guys: one or two big guys or brute-type monsters, a whole gaggle of minions, and then either an evil villain or a couple of mid-level guard-type creatures/bad guys. Each of them should have a "home" arena where basically they start at, and don't be afraid to put one or two in the "entrance" arena if you feel so inclined.

Cool, so I label my encounter, scribble a few notes, than throw it on the backburner in order to flesh out the rest of the adventure. I usually keep myself limited to only really detailing what I think the group would realistically play through in the session I'm planning for, I find that the stuff that extends past that starts getting inspired pretty naturally along the way anyway.

As we're looking at the greater adventure our encounter is in, it's pretty obvious that we need a macguffin. An object of value, someone to be rescued, or vengeance/foiling of an evil plot (and any combination thereof) are the pretty standard go-to formulas here. I look at the "flavor" of the setpiece encounter I've come up with and try to think along those lines in order to work up a motivator. From there I just need to connect that motivator to the nearest civilization either by simple rumor or someone/thing more invested in it. Really at this point it's just coming up with names: "Lidas the priest of the one-armed God is after the fabled Floating Cask of Nifleb" or "Kruzzered Kraw needs his daughter to be rescued from the Ironjaw goblins, but ultimately it's to sacrifice her to the six-demoned altar under his inn".

Last but not least I think up a diversion or two along the way (or after the fact, like old Kraw), either some third party getting its nose into things, some "wandering monster with a lair" type that just happens to be en-route, or just some extra "fun facts" about the whole situation in general (The desert bandits have nothing to do with the Cloud Whale empire, but damn does that cloud whale love to eat the bandits' flying wasps!). The diversion might come with it's own two or three arena-type environment, but we're not really looking to fill this out much beyond "theme".

That's the basic formula for prepping for a session's worth of gaming, now let's talk about actually running the damn thing.