I wrote quite an extensive review of this book here: https://archiveofthesphinx.com/2022/08/15/review-on-downtime-and-demesnes-b-x-version/

However here is ths short version: On Downtime and Demesnes is an excellent resource for those seeking to take their adventures beyond the dungeon. However it’s eclectic subjects and detailed subsystems make it better suited for solo play – or at most a small group that can appreciate a slower style of adventuring. While the page count has been padded with large lists of NPCs, items, and other curiosities the contents of these distractions are creative and enjoyable to read. While I rarely play B/X the procedures and ideas included in this book are easily adapted to other old-school variants of D&D and it’s derivatives.

This book is amazing. Not even so much for modifyiing the listed monsters (my vampires will never be worms infesting a host) but for coming up with creative ideas for other homebrew monsters. I wil only knock it one star for the fact that there is so much that is not in this book. it feels pretty bad knowing that this is only two thirds of what could have been and the rest was locked behind a kickstarter that was not well known at the time. I'm thankful for what I have, but I wish the rest could have been made publicly available in some form.

Found out about this from questing beast.
There is definitely a lot of good stuff in here, 192 pages compiled from the google+ community and I assume some original content. $20 is perhaps a little steep for a pdf, but I paid the price because I can definitely get some inspiration from this document.

Call me OCD but it bothers me that we are missing a lot of entries from Bens youtube review.
Namely the dragon turtle invisible stalker living statue lycanthropy manticore merfolk nixie ogre pixies rhagodessa rust monster salamander sprite troglodyte white ape giant hamsters from space slimes, oozes, puddings & jellies

I wouldn't care so much if I could jump on ebay and buy a physical copy, which I often do for the OSR stuff, typically a bookstore will buy themselves a copy and sell it.

But nope, I guess the print run was small, and advertising limited. So those monsters are lost forever.

I genuinely LOVE this kind of inspiration. These are the kinds of theory crafting hooks that can be pulled into anything, and they have the kind of wit and weirdness that I find wonderful and useful.

Worth the price, this is going to help my wife and I for quite a few campaigns.

EDIT: Didn't realize I was the first reviewer, I should probably make a more clear statement. The book contains entries for a ton of fantasy creatures, and each entry contains alternate names, a sort of short/high level description of the creature, and the bulk of each entry is a ton of rumors, thoughts, and ideas about each creature.

There are no statblocks, but you can take these things and with a sentence or two add some useful and effective spice to quests and sessions. Do you have a group of players who need to hunt a cockatrice but have never seen one before? Boom, advice on what townspeople might say and some ideas for spicing up the encounter. Need a reason for a boat to be haunted, or for there to be turmoil in the docks? Boom, dryad entry.

Highly recommend this, its a good resource for any DM looking to put their own spin on an encounter or region. Great asset for homebrews.

The author has mastered the lists of the Dungeon Masters Guide, remaking these into a potent little world-building resource. 5 Stars gladly given.

Good booklet which gave me lots of ideas. It made me buy Artifices, Deceptions, & Dilemmas and visit the authors blog http://hackslashmaster.blogspot.com/

It wasn't quite what I expected. I thought it may be henchman generation tables but it was essentially 10 characters sheets that weren't very interesting.

Great book to help with populating dungeons with interesting rooms, traps, and tricks. The first section gives you the different types of rooms the adventurers might find and the types of things typically found in those rooms. The next two sections are on traps and their triggers. Lot of great examples and ideas on how to present them to your players. The final section was on tricks that your players might come across. Those things that aren't quite traps, but aren't normal. A great reference book to help you when running dungeons.

These are some of the most useful comments on DM'ing that I have come across. Well worth 5 bucks. I have read this more than once.

Do you play fantasy roleplaying games? Do your fantasy roleplaying games need traps, tricks, or trappings for their rooms? Do you need amazing artwork to inspire you for the content of your dungeons? If any of these things are true, then this book addresses those needs in the best way possible. There are descriptions of traps, how they work, how they are commonly used, etc. There's advice on tricks, and how to employ them. The book is well-written, and did I mention that it has amazing artwork that will inspire you?

There's a lot of great ideas and inspiration in this book, if you don't mind it being a bit on the wild side. But there's one thing that annoys me, and that is that if you count over the NPCs suggested, maybe half of them aren't what they seem and plan to betray you. Of those who don't outright plan to kill you in your sleep to take your gold/sacrifice you to the evil cult they're secretly a member of/steal your horses to make sausage of, half of those again seem custom-designed to annoy the hell out of the players (think, "retainer who has a curse on him which turns him into a baby and forces whoever is nearby to care for him").

Do you want murder hoboes? Because that's how you get murder hoboes.

In MODERATION characters like these can be fun. Especially if you are careful to not be unfair, and give players ways to anticipate and avoid the frustration you're sending their way. But this book is heavily, heavily weighted to those things.

(From a review I wrote on Reddit some time ago):

On the Non-Player Character: Solving the Social Trap is Courtney Campbell's third very useful GM-ing supplement, and the first one for which he is charging. It is a good read, and has some very useful and (as far as I know) innovative techniques for objectively arbitrating NPC interactions. It also sells for $19.99 for a fairly sparsely-illustrated B&W 62-page pdf, or $26.99 for a saddle-stitched paperback.

There's good stuff in here. The mechanism for social interaction is an extension of the Moldvay-era Basic D&D 2d6 Reaction Roll. Rather than let the one roll be the whole story of the interaction, Campbell details a method where players can select from a list of over 20 social interactions, from Bribery and Negotiation to outright Threats. Each one has a chance of modifying the current standing of the NPC's reaction up or down, and each one ticks off a limited number of moves available until the NPC decides the time for talk has finished, and either co-operates or doesn't.

On top of this, the NPC may have a list of so-called "locks" and "keys", options that are guaranteed to provoke a specific (good or bad) reaction. The sample NPC sheet has space for 4 options, so you aren't expected to need many for any particular character.

As a concrete example, suppose the party runs into a suspicious night's watch, and the captain of the guard needs to decide whether to let them depart with a warning or lock them up for the night. The GM rolls 2d6, let's say for a result of five. The party's initial stance--threatening, friendly, or obsequious--might modify this up or down a point or two, as will a character's CHR score, but suppose the end result is still five. That's not good, but it isn't outright hostile--yet. The players now have five moves to improve his disposition (a number that the GM keeps secret). They can attempt to Bribe, Joke, Convert (to a religious or political idea), Shame, Threaten, or try any of a couple dozen such actions.

I created a captain who had a "key" reaction to Joking, that would allow the players to re-roll the previous reaction roll and take the better of the two, because I decided he had a sense of humor about his job. Bribery, on the other hand, was an automatic failure (or "lock"), which immediately drops his reaction and costs three additional moves.

The players banter with the GM, speaking either in character, or saying what they're trying to do. At some point, the GM says, "so it sounds like you're trying to Negotiate" (or whatever), and rolls the reaction dice. Either point of view, first or third, works, which is the key innovation of the game. Campbell's definition of role-playing is very Old School, in that you aren't trying to depict a character, so much as you are trying to stand in for him or her. So the decisions you make as a player are translated to moves for the character, without judging you on your acting skills or innate Charisma.

Additionally, he has a short section on Social Combat, which is likewise an expansion of Subdual Damage in 1st edition AD&D. Finally, he has a section on Argumentation, which is the attempt to convince an NPC with whom you have already had interactions to do soemthing. Campbell includes the classic example of asking a nobleman for help fighting the bad guy's army. Basically, the NPC has a list of beliefs, and a corresponding set of adventures where the party can find evidence to counter them. It's a fun system, and it is definitely a fair way to "play" social interaction.

There's a little cruft here, though. Although I suppose no NPC book is complete without a table of randomly-selected physical and personality traits, I didn't find much in these tables that I haven't seen elsewhere. They compose a non-trivial portion of the book's size, so much that Campbell added the actual character sheets and NPC lists as separate (free) downloads, because they would have put the page count too high to be practical for the hard-copy format.

The only really bad thing here is the price. $19.99 for a pdf is pretty steep, considering you can get entire award-winning games, with color illustrations and several times the page count, for that amount. If that had been the price of the hard-copy (with a free pdf download included), I would feel better about the money I spent. Still, I knew what it was when I purchased it, and I don't feel like I was ripped off in any way.

Once in a rare while, an RPG supplement comes out that doesn't need doctoring around with, adaptation or fiddling - it just works. OD&D (hahaha I see what you did there) is one such product.

Courtney Campbell has proved his worth many times over, both on his blog Hack & Slash and his other products on DTRPG. Even if all he ever released was his classic treasure document (which I use constantly) he would still have made a huge contribution to my own gaming table. Before he gutted it, his blog was a tremendous resource for traps, tricks & DM techniques, along with controversial classics like the legendary "Quantum Ogre."

How many times has your player tried to do something and you thought "Huh... where are the rules for that?" What I often find I need in a gaming book are not more combat rules or magic items but guidelines, tables, sub-systems and procedures. The kind of things I usually have to write myself, ad-hoc when the situation calls for it. I have always had to range far and wide across blogs, published books, pdfs and my own customised rules to cover the situations dealt with in this book. Now Courtney gives us the total package at a single stroke! In a way, the book is like a best-of collection from one man's gaming blog all put together in a nice & usable package. It is accompanied by plenty of Courtney's hand-drawn black & white artwork, which brings a charming '80s 1st-edition feel to the whole thing.

With OD&D we get an extensive list of downtime activities, domain-management rules, options, tables, ideas and hooks. Want to build a castle? Clear a hex? Buy & sell trade goods? Learn a new skill? Find rumours? Whatever it is, Courtney has your back.

Carousing. Healing. Rumours. Bragging. Buying fancy clothes. Gambling. Buying influence! Building your own vehicles! Simple rules for magic item creation and spell research!! Even some good rules for ARENA FIGHTS by Jove, and a few sample arenas to have them in!!! In true B/X house-rule fashion, almost everything is handled with a 2d6 reaction-style roll. Usually on an 9+ something good happens, but this varies between sub-systems.

I used this book in my home game the week I bought it. Vuk Thuul the oracle sacrificed an animal to his mysterious "divine patron" (a demon lord, hahaha). I had no idea what would happen, and then I cracked open OD&D and noticed there are rules for exactly that!

In addition to rules, guidelines and tables, great ready-to-use content is sprinkled throughout. Whenever Courtney gets specific, his imagination blasts off the page. Sections include "Example Mercenaries & Companies" (5 pages of juicy, weird NPCs I would run any day), "Strange Funeral Rites," "Dungeon Doors," "Strange Inheritances" (could easily kick off your next campaign), "Random Items for Sale at a Bazaar," "Strange Pet Stores" (OK, not sure when I'll use that) and several quirky, memorable sample villages.

I also like the lists of "100 obnoxious peasants" and "100 noble patrons," written by Chris Tamm of the legendary Elfmaids & Octopi blog. They definitely bear the familiar feel of Tamm's work, and I will for sure use them. Just reading them sent me into fits of chuckling as I imagined the bizarre, dangerous and funny antics these NPCs might bring to my game. Would I use these tables every single time? No, but that ain't no crime.

Campbell draws from a wide range of wisdom here in developing these rules. Actually, I think he doesn't cite his sources enough. Would it be too much to ask for a mention of the 1st edition DMG(!!!), or maybe Jeff's Gameblog for the carousing rules[1]? Maybe a lot of this stuff is covered in ACKS, which he does list in the bibliography? (I haven't read it). Also, this book does duplicate some material you probably already have, especially in the AD&D dungeon master's guide - in fact, it could probably be thought of as a B/X DMG. I don't mind too much. Having almost everything I could want to run the "Greater D&D" in one book is more than worth it.

One other complaint I'd level at OD&D is that it covers such a tremendously wide range of material, sometimes it doesn't do so with the depth I'd like. The Influence rules could have been delved into more deeply, or maybe explained better. And the "carousing mishaps" table has 10 entries of familiar stuff. Ultimately this is a minor complaint, this book was clearly written so it can be used in anybody's game, and a DM who wants to expand these tables to suit his own setting obviously can.

I bought this in pdf and after paging through it once, I immediately ordered a hard copy. It's going right in between Realms of Crawling Chaos and Labyrinth Lord on my old-school gaming shelf, it is that good. If you want to run a sandbox game (and if you don't... what's the deal?) you will definitely make use of this. If you play just about any old-school game or retroclone, there is now one less reason to bring your 1st edition DMG along to game night anymore, just to reference the rules on sages for the twentieth time. Just as well, since mine is crumbling before my very eyes!

Don't waste your RPG lunch money. The marketplace is crammed with unimaginative dreck, impossible-to-run adventure path railroads, retro trade dress porn, kickstarter money grabs and pretentious glossy award-baiting. Buy something you can actually use at the table for once. Who says the OSR is dead? This is as OSR as it gets.

9 eccentric henchmen out of 10. An almost flawless victory.

[1] - Jeff's "Party like it's 999" post is not the first time carousing is mentioned (Dragon magazine covered this in the old days), but it is the benchmark for the rules that OSRmen play with today.

Originally posted at https://terriblesorcery.blogspot.com

A deluxe, lavish upgrade and expansion on Hack & Slash blog's Tricks, Empty Rooms, and Basic Trap Design. The surfeit of painstaking illustrations is a feast for the eyes. One of the most actually useful documents you can incorporate -right now- to enhance your game.

(Please note: I recived this from the Kickstarter as a backer.)

This is a solid set of Tools for players, and GM's. System neutral, but leaning heavily toward OSR. It builds on, and vastly improves upon the downtime rules from 5e. As well as adding a few twists of it's creaters devising.

That said, there are a few errors. I also feel the Profesinoal income section needed expansion.

I can safely recomend this book to others.