Review: Grizzled Adventurers - Trails and Travails

October 25, 2025

Added to Catalog: 2022-12-28
Publisher: Flatland Games
Authors: John Cocking, Peter S. Williams
Store URL: DriveThruRPG

I haven't read the main book for Grizzled Adventurers, so I'm going in fairly blind here. The store page places it in the Old-School Revival category. Presentation-wise, it's easy to digest and contains a couple of nice illustrations.

As the subtitle "Travel, Getting Old, and getting home: surviving outside the dungeon" implies, the work is about adding seasoning to an adventurer's life outside of the dangerous job of looting dungeons. This breaks down into:

Rules for returning from the dungeon and what events occur on the way
Events for PCs that miss a session
Events for PCs as they grow older
Some magic items mostly flavoured around ameliorating age-related ailments
Some bestiary entries to give mechanical weight to the travel events

Getting Home first requires you to pick a destination; going "All the Way Back Home" requires 6 Travail rolls, but a closer location like "Your Country Cousin's Place" only requires 2, but of course they will be expecting gifts and there won't be many shops around to restock for your next adventure. Travail rolls are on a 2d20 table, with a fair variety of possible events. Some deplete the adventurers' resources or treasure, some waste time, and some are opportunities. Four of the entries on the table are "Stumble Upon a Minor Location", which allows for development of the game world and a way to highlight non-combat skills.

I enjoyed how applicable the contents are to any TTRPG system instead of being locked to Grizzled Adventurers. As an OGL product, the rules appear similar to D&D 3rd Edition, so some adaptation for different ability / skills / currency systems would be required, but there is enough meat here to bring to other tables. There's also a few decent pieces of GM advice in here too, like noticing if players bond with specific NPCs and locations so they can be promoted to recurring ones.

All in all, this was a quick read, very approachable despite having no familiarity with the system, and I can immediately see how I might use it in my own games. The subject of ageing is also treated with appropriate weight and humour. I look forward to reading more by these authors.