I have thoroughly enjoyed using these Beyond the Wall (BtW) books for running games. In order to encourage players to participate in AD&D/TTRPG type games, one has to make it as simple, yet as engaging as possible. Once the players connect, all sorts of rules can be added to suit later. In the meantime, BtW allows you to do what it says - ie generate characters and start an adventure within an hour or so. That was all it took. Use the scenarios provided, or generate your own.

I was surprised at how potent mages are from the get go. And any character can have a few 17's or 18's to start with. Fortune points give the characters a bit of a leg up, yet a death may be imminent. This gives the players hope whilst always keeping them on edge.

The BtW collection is great for a beginner DM or an experienced DM to run an adventure at a moments notice for players who want that 70's AD&D feel in a rules light environment.

I love this game so much. The character creation is fantastic!

I love this work and all its expansions. It's a perfect blend of narrative an OSR in the hearth fantasy subgenre that deeply appeals to me.
I've used it solo and in groups and its worked well in both playstyles. If you love coming-of-age style fantasy, narrative-rich playstyles, easy to play OSR with a twist, then this is for you.
The standout features are:

1. Hearth fantasy setting.
2. Lifepath character, party, and village generation.
3. Scenario packs that are frameworks for generating vartiants on a theme, which cleverly interact with the the lifepath generation.
4. Pick up and play a scenario in about 4 hours as a one-shot.
5. Ways to expand on the above for extended campaign play and sandbox generation.
6. Really flavourful variant magic system, True Names, etc. I'd buy anything Flatland Games publishes (and have) - they're producing my kind of games.

I really love this narrative take on OSR sword and sorcery. I won't wax lyrical as there are more comprehensive reviews that do a much better job, however, I felt compelled to give my two thumbs up to support a publisher (Flatland Games), as I've love everything they've produced. It works really well for me.
Check out Beyond the Wall for another unique product that really nails hearth fantasy.

Thank you Ian for this game !

Just ran this tonight as a 3h one-shot, character creation and scenario outline included, with a group of four at my local club and we had a blast. Best for me, it was easy to run and I actually had a lot of fun.

First experience with pbta, new players in the group, average age 40+.

Excellent material. I was looking forward to some campaign setting for Beyond the Wall and thought this book was lost to time. Not only the guys at Flatland Games delivered with a very cool and evocative setting, they also added in the book lots of other material. This supplement also includes seasonal campaign rules, playing 0 level characters, new legendary items and other stuff. Super happy with what we got.

The new book is amazing! I'd been looking forward to seeing the official Flatlands take on rules for zero-level characters, and wasn't disappointed.

The real surprise was the included campaign world and how developed it is. Previous BtW material has seemed to assume a homebrew setting developed over the course of play. The included game world sort of ties together all of the previous products.

Pretty cool, Flatlands Guys!!! I have to admit that I didn't think this book would ever come out. I hope this publication sparks a renewed interest in the game, and I also hope that a POD option appears soon! :D

I've been running Grizzled Adventurers for RPG sessions where I didn't have the time to do the sometimes hours-long prep needed to run other games.

I was already familiar with the wonderful Beyond the Wall and picked this up as a tongue-in-cheek look at the other end of the heroic journey.

While Beyond the Wall and Through Sunken Lands use playbooks allowing players to pick an archetype and then weave their characters together into a cohesive group, Grizzled Adventurers deconstructs Flatland Games' design a bit, making class just one more roll in the process. Almost everyone uses a single playbook that focuses on the characters' past together and the things the characters might be squabbling about, decades after they happen. (I allow my players to pick their class, as randomly determining it both sets up some parties for failure and sometimes sticks players with characters they won't enjoy.) You probably want at least three player characters to be created at a time, to get maximum value out of the tables.

Latecomers, who are rolled up seperately, have a seperate, even more simplified playbook. They also look like they might end up with higher stats, which is interesting. Maybe that's meant as a tradeoff for not having the fun of creating a character with the rest of the players.

Physical stats are much lower than they end up being in the other two games, which is supposed to represent missing fingers, bad shoulders, lost eyes and the like. None of my players have minded, but there's always a moment of shock when one realizes they're playing a warrior with a 7 Strength. (Stats in all of these games will be familiar to anyone who's played any edition of Dungeons & Dragons over the decades.)

Like the other two games, Grizzled Adventurers is a mix of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (saving throws versus type, a mix of rolling high and rolling low) and third edition (a single unified rolling system, a light skill system). I found play to be fast, only slowed by remembering which rolls were high and which rolls were low.

Where the game really shines is in its dungeon creation. The DM asks questions throughout the character creation process (which is unfortunately not represented on the character hand-outs, which would facilitate the questions being asked and players remembering their character developing answers), which are then used to help inspire the evening's dungeon.

A bunch of small Dyson Logos maps are provided in the book and a pair of treasures (one the MacGuffin driving the adventure, one a surprise) are randomly determined, along with two traps and then the DM picks two enemy types for the dungeons and selects encounters from each to drop in. In practice, the process has taken less than five minutes and has meant some very flavorful and satisfying dungeon adventures. This is aided by the monsters having a nice dose of creativity injected into what could otherwise be stale standard dungeon monsters. Swarms of goblins and skeletons turn standard monster fights into something much more visceral and scary and the demons and summoned creatures present in some dungeons are likewise creative (whoever came up with the rolling ball of claws demon needs to make a horror game).

I supplemented the tables in the book with online name generators for magic swords, dungeon names and necromancer names, and tossed various appropriate nouns into Google Translate to come up with creepy gods and goddesses for the characters to encounter shrines to underground.

The sessions I've run have taken less than three hours to resolve, including character creation at the beginning. We haven't yet run one of the optional return home epilogues from Travels and Travails, but that's planned for next time. I can also see a need, eventually, for the promised dungeon design guide to give us more options, but this is already a great game to have on hand for times when you want to play a dungeon crawler but don't have the time or energy to deal with either prepping something heavy or running something heavier.

This is not meant to be the one fantasy RPG to rule them all. It's designed for a small handful of adventure types -- dungeon crawls and overland travel to and from dungeon crawls -- but is excellent at those. (I could also see a supplement on running tavern brawls, which seems like it'd be very fitting for these characters.) But it would also work well with any OSR adventure or setting, if one wanted to do so. I plan on running my grizzled adventurers through the Dungeon of 1,000 Swords next time everyone is together and will likely be using the Monster Overhaul as my monster book for Grizzled Adventurers when I'm looking for critters beyond what this game offers. (If there was ever a crew that should have to deal with a grue, it's the Grizzled Adventurers.)

An enthusiastic A+ of a game.

I love this game so much I have been telling all my gaming friends to check it out and bought a print on demand copy after reading the PDF.

I've read at least a dozen versions of OSR looking for the perfect one and this is the one where I thought, that's it, I found it. Mechanically, it combines the best elements of B/X and 3e/5e D&D. And thematically, it gets away from the increasingly played out conceit of a tenth generation photocopy of Tolkien in favor of an assumption that the default otherworld is the realm of fairy, with goblins being nasty fairies. The magic system is based on the 3e/5e distinction between cantrips, spells, and rituals but with the important distinction that a) spells are safe but finite whereas cantrips and rituals are risky but infinite and b) all the powerful spells (anything that in 3e/5e would be 3rd level or higher) are rituals.

The star of the game is the character generation, a brilliant system that I haven't seen used in any other game (except of course for BtW's sword and sorcery edition, Through Sunken Lands). There is a standard character generation option, but the preferred way is to choose an archetype and then roll from a series of tables that in about ten minutes give your character not only stats and gear, but also a backstory and relationships with the other PCs. All this is built on a dead simple three class system (warriors, casters, and rogues/specialists).

Both mechanically and thematically, Beyond the Wall makes the supernatural feel weird and this notion of magic as something that is out there makes magic feel much more magical than "my tiefling sorcerer fires a 1d8 firebolt cantrip again." If you're interested in weird fantasy I highly recommend this. If you prefer sword and sorcery, try Through Sunken Lands (same publisher and game mechanics, different genre). If you want Tolkien-esque standard fantasy in Forgotten Realms maybe still check it out just for the character generation.

I have to admit that I haven't been brave enough to run the scenario packs (BtW's version of adventure modules, which are presented as a series of random tables). It might be that they work great but they require more GM improvisation confidence than "here's a map and a series of keyed entries." However I was very happy running Beyond the Wall with Winter's Daughter, a module written for OSE (a B/X retroclone) -- pretty much all I had to do was tone down the treasure as BtW doesn't use gp=xp. My players (one old grognard who played AD&D in the 80s and another guy who had only played 5e) hadn't read the book but still immediately understood the rules based on my brief summary.

If you play D&D and ever thought:

• My group's PC's are never grounded so they always get away with murderhobo stunts and I rather they had a good in-game reason not too.
• I wonder how I can give the PCs reasonably quick and organic backstories that connect them together
• I wish I could put together engaging one-shots with very little effort
• I wish I could make magic a bit more mysterious and allow concepts like allowing PCs to use "true names" to defeat foes easier
• It would be great if the character classes skewed more towards YA fantasy classes
• I'd like for the rules to "get out of the way" but still provide a framework and support the story

If you have had any of these thoughts, you NEED this game!

The single best resource I have ever found for running a fantasy sandbox!

Based on a read only: A great genre emulator with a clever concept using the "Actor" as the interstitial tissue that turns this from a one-shot to a campaign. I'll revisit my rating again after finishing a play session

Beyond the Wall is a simple, character driven RPG that focuses on the important stuff. The game's greatest strengths lay in how its character creation process integreates relationships with other PC's so that your party feels like it's been together for ages. The game also includes fun rules for collaborative worldbuilding through telling stories. The system even accounts for the fact that the characters might not know what they're talking about. There are also some helpful guidelines for designing point crawl style adventures. The game is designed so you can play one shot adventures, or short campaigns without a ton or prepwork by the players or storyteller.

Like any old school game, the rules are simple and intended for the storyteller to make adjustments on the fly. There's not a ton of crunch here and its not really needed. Most of the character detail and customization comes from playbooks rather than the basic classes.

I don't play Beyond the Wall all the time, but it has changed how I run games such as D&D.

This is an absolutely fantastic game, with a community that I very much hopes continues to grow with such rewarding material. This brings a wonderful co-collaborative mindset to the games, really stresses quality roleplay with actually building bonds and other dynamics into the game (for once), so the worldbuilding and character creation/backstory sessions are not only rich, detailed and enjoyable, but allow for a more immersive story where PC's have very real relationships with stakes and interesting hooks and plot devices. Absolutely love the mentality of not only this book but the other supplement books, they get everything right about OSR and TTRPGs in general. Highly recommended!

A truly sincere sword and sorcery rpg that not only is true to the genre, the gaming world is presented in a way that the group can flesh out the world; you are not wading in someone else's homebrew setting. The rules are easy to read, learn and teach to others and the setting is easy to immerse a group into. I honestly do not think I could ask for more from a s&s rpg than Through Sunken Lands and Other Adventures.