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The importance of a setting

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Delving Wolf! In this week's post I want to talk about settings in TTRPG, specifically in a fantasy one (as that's the genre I'm most familiar with). Even within the fantasy genre, the importance of a setting varies between games: some are defined by their official setting, others are more malleable and can be played either in a published setting or in a homebrew one; D&D 5e is an example of this. There are many official settings for 5e, from Forgotten Realms, to Eberron (my personal favorite), to Greyhawk (with the new 2024 rules), to Dragonlance, to some more niche ones like Theros and the other Magic the Gathering-inspired settings; if we take previous editions in consideration, we can add many more like Mystara or Dark Sun. While older settings have their rules, cities, regions, deities and habits clearly defined, often in multiple books or magazines (sometimes even with too much detail: do we really need to know the taste of Drow...
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My first solo session - Basic Fantasy RPG

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    Hello everyone, and welcome back to Delving Wolf! In today's blog post I will tell you about my first approach both at solo TTRPGing and to playing an OSR game, and what I learned from the experience.   I decided to do this to learn more about OSR games before trying to be the referee for someone else, because I know the transition from 5e to old school games can be difficult and take a bit to adapt to, so I'd be able to help my future players in doing the same. Kevin Crawford's Black Streams: Solo Heroes allows me to play as just one beefed up character, and I chose Chris Gonnerman's Basic Fantasy RPG as my system of choice because, while I've not made a choice yet on which one to use for a future campaign, it seems like a good introduction; also because the dungeon I decided to run was from Chris Gonnerman's The Role-playing Game Primer and Old School Playbook and used Basic Fantasy stats natively: it would've been easy to convert it to anoth...
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What lured me in & my first adventure

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 Hello everyone, and welcome back to Delving Wolf! In today's blog post I figured I'd talk a bit about the reasons that led me to approach the OSR community, and what changes it has sparked in my life. When I actively entered the world of TTRPGs I only knew about 5e, not unlike most people just entering the hobby; I was only vaguely aware that there were previous editions of D&D (and why should I have cared? They were old, the newest one had to be the best anyway) and I even remember the first time I heard  about Pathfinder I told my friend I played with at the time "Did you know there's another TTRPG?" or something similar. Yeah, I know. But Pathfinder itself never caught my attention, because at the time I knew it as "D&D with more math", so that newfound knowledge remained a seed for some time. Then, a year or so later, that seed sprouted, and I started exploring the new (to me) and vast world of TTRPGs besides D&D 5e: I spent so much time...
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Peace and Redemption, Session 1

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 Hello everyone, and welcome back to Delving Wolf! Today I will post the recap of the first session of the 5e GMless campaign me and my partner played on the first evening of the year, but before getting to that, a few notes about the campaign. We decided to start it a few months ago, I had the idea because our IRL group was imploding (then it didn't, then it did again...it's a story for another post), and we had a session 0. We decided 5e as the system because at the time we both had only experience in that, starting at level 3 to not be too frail (looking back at it now that I'm more into OSR, this is ironic) with Mythic GME for the fate chart and random events; I chose a Ranger and my partner chose a Cleric.  We made the world map that you can see in the picture with the ageless method of pouring rice on the paper and marking the edges of the world, then throwing dice on it to mark mountains, towns, lakes and the like. Then we didn't touch it for a while, because bei...
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An Introduction

Hello everyone, and welcome to Delving Wolf! What is Delving Wolf? Well, nothing more than the (at least) millionth TTRPG related blog, because I have the audacity to believe that my opinions matter enough that somebody will actually be interested in reading them.  For my first article I am going to introduce myself and tell you a bit about the kind of articles I am planning to post in here. I am Kirhon, I'm from Italy and I've been vaguely interested into D&D (at the time that was a synonym to TTRPG for me, like for many people) for many many years, but without anyone to play with it was just a dream, until one day, near the end of 2021, while watching  an actual play series on YouTube  I decided that maybe I could finally try it myself, and since my birthday was approaching, I got the D&D Essential Kit...before even asking anyone to play with me! But I figured I'll find someone. Best decision of my life. I did find one friend who was interested, I started DMing ...
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