Looking Back and Forward - the OSR in 2017

2016 has a bad reputation around the Internet because of celebrities dying and certain things about elections, but as far as old school gaming, "good" would be an understatement. It was a pretty phenomenal year.

First and foremost, 2016 saw the publication of Maze of the Blue Medusa. Not just the best RPG product of the year, it's one of the seminal products in the whole OSR, an adventure with such dense and imaginative ideas that you could get lost in it for years. Just the wandering monsters in the book are a revelation, much less the hundreds of keyed areas. Patrick Stuart is one of the most creative voices working in old school gaming today, and the book clearly benefited from both Zak S's artwork and his relentless dedication to doing things extremely well. Also, its layout is revolutionary and sets new standards for RPGs.

A thing I like but haven't talked about much is The Black Hack. This was released in March and quickly created its own ecosystem of products. Black Hack is a stripped-down, ultra-light clone of D&D that incorporates a number of clever ideas for streamlining play. I am particularly fond of its usage die concept for abstract handling of expendable items, where a die reduces in size as the item is used up. This squares well with things like arrows and abstract combat. My favorite particular supplement for the Black Hack is a bestiary called Waste-Land Beasts and How to Kill Them. It's a terrific collection of post-apocalyptic nasties with some great illustrations.

Maze of the Blue Medusa winning out on the product front overshadows some great adventures. Misty Isles of the Eld is a psychedelic sandbox addition from the Hydra Cooperative. Lamentations of the Flame Princess delivered both Rafael Chandler's World of the Lost (a dinosaur romp in Africa aimed directly at my heart) and Jeff Rients's Broodmother SkyFortress, each of which could have won product of the year accolades in some other year. They even overshadow the new Carcosa modules by Geoffrey McKinney, which were good but could have been incredible with some art and layout work.

The Swords & Wizardry Whitebox ecosystem also put up some great work. One that I particularly think is going to create some great convention play is WWII: Operation Whitebox. This is a special forces-oriented game that I am hoping to run in convention play. White Star also got a Companion that, I think, elevates it over the original game considerably and makes it a really solid engine for sci-fi gaming.

Bruce Heard, formerly of Mystara, released Calidar: Beyond the Skies, a god-focused product that mingles story and supplement in the style of the Princess Ark stories from Dragon magazine. Autarch released Lairs & Encounters for its Adventurer Conqueror King system, which provides a valuable assortment of monster lairs that can fit into a hexcrawl.

So yeah, 2016 was a good one for the old school. What is on the horizon for 2017?

A couple of new system books loom. Swords & Wizardry Complete will enter its 3rd edition, with an improved layout and a new cover and an awesome all-woman team doing the update. Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea will release a second edition. And Jim Wampler's Mutant Crawl Classics is due out from Goodman Games. All of those have a chance to redefine the landscape for the next year.

I'm hopeful that a couple of delayed adventure projects will hit this year. Ernie Gygax and Benoist Poire's Marmoreal Tomb would be a big one, particularly for people like me with a lot of cash in the release. And it's looking like Jim Ward's Epsilon City for Metamorphosis Alpha will also hit this year, making that an officially thorough system.

I'm excited for Clint Krause's The Driftwood Verses, a sea-drenched adventure done up for LotFP (but not an LotFP release) and the Hydra Collective's Operation Unfathomable. Not to mention that Patrick Stuart could just win another year's releases if Veins of the Earth comes out from LotFP and lives up to the reputation that he and Scrap Princess have built with DCO and Fire on the Velvet Horizon.

And that's just what we already have a bead on for the coming year. The OSR has been firing on all cylinders for three years now, and it shows no signs of slowing down. So grab your dice and buckle up, it should be a good one.

First Thoughts: White Boxes

On a recent Lulu jaunt I picked up a small softcover called White Box because of its Stefan Poag cover. It's a revised version of Swords & Wizardry Whitebox. Both are pictured above with what I think are their best covers: the original S&W:WB by Pete Mullen and the new WB by Poag. Both books are pretty similar in size, and both are quite affordable. White Box is all of $5.99 in print. This is quite a contrast to the actual OD&D woodgrain box that just sold for $22,100 on eBay.

If you've read the Swords & Wizardry Whitebox book before, White Box's contents are immediately familiar. Taking advantage of the original's use of the Open Game License, WB contains a lot of the S&W:WB text, though it puts it into a fresh and attractive layout. The internal art uses William McAusland's fantasy stock art, which you will find familiar, particularly from Labyrinth Lord. It's a funny feeling to see images like McAusland's mace-wielding cleric repeated, although slightly nostalgic for those of us who cut our teeth on 1990s TSR products, when pictures were in heavy reuse. Still, as a whole the look and feel of the book is a step up from S&W:WB, which felt like it was printed off of a word processor.

A Thief class sneaks into this game, with a simple "Thievery" die; this made its way from James Spahn's White Box Omnibus. It's an ultra-light solution to the thief class, fitting with the White Box approach, using a d6 roll for all thief skills. It starts off with a 2-in-6 chance, working its way up to 5-in-6 by 10th level. If this system seems simplistic, the probabilities wind up being favorable to the low-level thief. In White Box, 3rd level thieves have a 2 in 6 chance of performing a thief task, or 33%. No B/X thief at 3rd level has a skill over 30%. Likewise at 6th level, a 3 in 6 chance (50%) beats B/X's 45% chance to pick pockets or open locks. It's only at 9th level or so that thieves slip behind.

Mason expanded S&W:WB's hopelessly thin "Playing the Game" rules with a list of extra rules adapted from other sources. Overland movement from Delving Deeper makes its way in, as do the basic dungeon exploration rules (here credited to Douglas Maxwell, though I'm not sure where his rules are available). This goes a long way toward making White Box a more complete game than the Swords & Wizardry Whitebox version. Similar rules have made their way into other S&W iterations but S&W:WB has stayed in more or less the same form since 2010.

A few other rules make their way into combat, such as jousting (credited to John Stater from Bloody Basic) and a morale chart – the latter is not given specific credit but it's a fine and simple table. The rest follows, pretty straightforwardly, from S&W:WB. Curiously, the example of combat from S&W:WB has gone missing. I'm not sure how useful it was, as I wouldn't have read it if not for doing this overview. It's certainly not the densely written combat examples of Holmes D&D or the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide.

White Box takes the rest of the book fairly literally. The one change to spells is that an overlap in the tables for the Sleep spell is removed. There are more monsters, and a few monster entries are tweaked, but what you get is pretty much what you'd expect. Treasure follows the monster-based system in Swords & Wizardry, which is probably the only real disappointment for me; I'd have preferred if Mason could have brought over the stocking rules from Delving Deeper, but that would have been a bigger shift.

This is a complete RPG for $6 in print, and captures much of the earliest edition of D&D in 166 pages at 6"x9" size. It's a good update of Swords & Wizardry Whitebox, which has sat fallow for years, and if I may have liked a further-going revision, this one is welcome. I'd recommend it over the original, particularly in the Stefan Poag cover. The edits and updates make me feel better about it as a complete game that could be run by a referee with no experience with OSR or older D&D games.

The Changing Face of the OSR

Yesterday the Swords & Wizardry Complete 3rd Printing Kickstarter launched. For reasons there has been talk about its cover:

The cover is a major departure from the last printing, which featured an Erol Otus original:

The Otus cover speaks strongly to me, but the change has me reflecting on the change in the OSR. We've gone from the original Labyrinth Lord:

To the art book that is Maze of the Blue Medusa:

Okay, that's enough showing pictures. I think it illustrates the basic point, which is that there is a shift afoot in the OSR away from old TSR and toward a very different and current aesthetic.

As much as I like the Otus cover for S&W Complete, it's a cover that ties the game back to TSR. As much as it's a fresh piece, it has intentional echoes of the cover for the Moldvay Basic box - and that leaves it in what is now effectively the OSR's past. Fewer and fewer OSR modules feel the need to consciously emulate TSR's look and feel, and Lamentations of the Flame Princess has been the leader here.

By severing the TSR connection, Swords & Wizardry has a chance to be its own game. I think that's particularly important for S&W to move forward, since effectively Frog God has just treated it as one of several options along with Pathfinder and 5e D&D. It doesn't have a strong identity, and if it could gain one outside of bog-standard fantasy, I think that would be a wonderful thing.

Look at the Kickstarter, by the way - the layout of the book is also getting a radical overhaul. I'm most excited for monster illustrations by Gennifer Bone, the artist who worked with Rafael Chandler on Lusus Naturae. Gennifer is one of the most exciting artists in the OSR right now, and I'd recommend you back her on Patreon.

It's kind of a funny coincidence to me that my recent game, set in the megadungeon I am slowly working on, used Swords & Wizardry Complete. More than any other OSR system, S&W really benefits from a strong vision on the referee's part, and I think giving the book a new look and adventures outside of the Gygaxo-Arnesonian tradition is a move toward that. LotFP, after all, is not far off from B/X D&D in the text of the rules but the actual play experience is far different. I'd like to see where Swords & Wizardry can go.

Open Source Roleplaying, and Success by Amazon

A recent industry report by the creators of Roll20 shows that the Basic Fantasy Role-Playing Game is a legitimately popular RPG, sitting between Pelgrane Press's 13th Age and Monte Cook's Cypher System in popularity. I've written in positive terms about BFRPG before, and I think it's a solid old school system. I still love its declaration of "This is OLD SCHOOL" even if I'd prefer a layout with a bit more pizazz. But BFRPG is smart in ways that other RPGs haven't thought about.

If you read the Project News page on the Basic Fantasy site, you will see that the game is constantly undergoing a process of being honed, re-proofed, corrected, and occasionally updated in very minor ways. It reads like a log of updates to a piece of software, right down to the release numbers and the idea of "release candidates" for print versions.

Basic Fantasy is, to my knowledge, the only RPG out there that is actually serious about the idea of being an open source RPG. You can literally download the Open Office document files that the rulebook PDFs (and the printed versions) are derived from, work on them, and if you want - make them your own. Swords & Wizardry has a single RTF document, but it's not the actual source of the layout for the print versions. Of course, this constrains the layout (see above), but it's a radically open concept in gaming.

The community recently leveraged this to create a Field Guide, a bestiary full of creatures both new and old. If you look at the amount of material between new classes, races, and additional/alternate rules, it's clear that there is a possibility for BFRPG to release a fairly thorough "Advanced" or "Companion" type of product with the ability to branch far beyond its four races and four classes. And since the rules are all modular, you can plug any of them into a game. And it doesn't even have to be BFRPG; it could just as well be Moldvay or Labyrinth Lord or LotFP.

But I don't think the open source approach is the only reason for Basic Fantasy's spread on Roll20, which I suspect may reflect broader support than many people realize. Because Basic Fantasy RPG is able to spread through Amazon. When I pull up FATE Accelerated, I see this on the third page of the related items scroller:

The Basic Fantasy rulebook pops up all over the RPG recommendations on the Internet's largest store, and it's a complete RPG for only five bucks. It has 83 reviews and 73 of those give it five stars. When you look at it you also see a book of monsters and four adventure books, each of them under $4. BFRPG, the Field Guide, Adventure Anthology 1, BF1 Morgansfort, BF2 Fortress Tower and Tomb, and JN1 The Chaotic Caves combined cost only $23.96, and easily provide a weekly group with a year's worth of adventure. At $5, extra copies of the rulebook for the table are not an expensive luxury; each player could have the rulebook, even though they don't really need it.

I suspect that BFRPG has been quietly spreading old school gaming ideas through its placement on Amazon. And that's all to the good. Not everything in the OSR is loud and shiny and front and center; a lot of people are just playing straighforward RPGs that make a good time for them and their friends. Which is kind of humbling from the perspective of those of us toward the center of OSR circles.

Basic Fantasy has been continuously revised and updated, even if only incrementally, for almost a decade. It's a quality open source product and its community is doing as much as any publisher out there to build old school roleplaying. It is what it says on the box: a meat and potatoes old school experience. And it deserves more acclaim than I think it gets.

The Old School Renaissance in 2015 and Beyond

2015 is coming to an end, and that means it's time to think about what happened this year and what lies ahead for old school gaming in 2016.

Metamorphosis Alpha is the big revival of the year. Going from a couple of stray releases to a full-blown product line is impressive. The MA renaissance will continue next year when Epsilon City is released. Our stout Warden commander, Jim Ward, got through a rough bout in the hospital and had a successful Gofundme. Deluxe Tunnels & Trolls also hit this year, a significantly expanded and updated version of the T&T game.

The big intriguing question for next year is what will happen with Runequest 2. The republication of Chaosium's classic RQ rules is wrapping up a very successful Kickstarter campaign with promises of it becoming, once again, a full-blown campaign line. Tied directly to Glorantha, this effectively puts the kibosh on decades of attempts to make RQ generic, and also has promise to make a classic rule set a major part of today's RPG scene. Part of its interest is that RQ is deliberately not Gygaxo-Arnesonian fantasy.

Consider something. Between online print-on-demand releases and reprints, it's been possible over the last few years to get OD&D, AD&D, T&T, Metamorphosis Alpha, Empire of the Petal Throne, Traveller, many Judges Guild products, and next year Runequest legally in their unadulterated original forms. Effectively the way people gamed in the 1970s is immediately accessible. That's not an unimpressive feat. I think the OSR has had a wide impact in this, and it's something to enjoy.

Goodman Games is in fine fettle. They released a Monster Alphabet that was almost a side question to their constant flow of Dungeon Crawl Classics products and their wave of reprints. DCC has brought the boxed set back with Chained Coffin and Peril on the Purple Planet, and is about to go to new levels of excess with the 4th printing. Joseph Goodman has found a niche, found its spending level, and is pushing its buttons like a maestro.

The up and comers are worth talking about. Autarch, whose saga with Dwimmermount threatened to delay its Adventurer Conqueror King, released an excellent sandbox module with The Sinister Stone of Sakkara and is putting forward a Lairs & Encounters book in Kickstarter that promises awesome stuff. These guys are hitting their stride.

White Box is also having a day in the sun as a highly adaptable platform, with White Star and White Lies released this year and more to come. It's far from perfect but has created a flurry of activity. S&W White Box is also back in active and solid support. My hope is that this is more the legacy that Swords & Wizardry has rather than as a kid sidekick to Pathfinder for Frog God's releases.

Lamentations of the Flame Princess rocked the world by winning ENnies and then failed to release anything new other than T-shirts. Which means that 2016 is primed to be an absolutely humongous year again. The number of products that Raggi owes everyone is high and the individual projects are promising. Also, Geoffrey McKinney is going to release four hexcrawl modules for his excellent Carcosa setting around Spring 2016. Geoffrey's new work will be AD&D compatible.

Several companies, including Goodman and Frog God, have tried to make old school 5e happen. Nobody's made any splash whatsoever. FGG's books (Quests of Doom, Book of Lost Spells, Fifth Edition Foes) are quality but haven't created a distinct space. Neither have Goodman's Fifth Edition Fantasy modules. They sell but are sort of absorbed in the generic 5e 3PP space, which is primed to be won by products from people like Sasquatch Studios and Kobold Press. The "O5R" is effectively on life support.

This year's big winners, though, are small presses doing their own thing via Lulu and OneBookShelf (DriveThruRPG/RPGNow). Yoon-Suin is hands down the best old school product of the year, and Fire on the Velvet Horizon is a full and worthy answer to the gauntlet that Zak S. threw down with A Red & Pleasant Land. Richard LeBlanc (Creature Compendium, Basic Psionics Handbook), Simon Forster (Book of Lairs), Kabuki Kaiser (Castle Gargantua) and the White Box crew, particularly James Spahn (White Box Companion, White Star), have been crushing it. I am really impressed by the work of all these people and a half-dozen more, and I'm extremely pleased that DIY self-published products managed to take the initiative in a year that easily could've been under the shadow of 5e and LotFP's mega-year in 2014.

The Zines keep coming too. This has been a fun year, including the innovation of the one-page zine. It's still mostly clustered around the same suspects as last year, but there have been a few additions. I keep a collection in Google+ called Zine Alert! that people should follow. I have a standing personal policy to both buy and promote any handmade old school zines offered, so if you plus me on the post or message me with it I'll spread the word.

The old school gaming scene rocked in 2015. Personally I got to play MA, OD&D, B/X D&D, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, and DCC RPG. Hopefully I'll be able to add White Star to that soon as I'm rather jazzed by the recent Star Wars film. LotFP set the bar high in 2014, and I think small press and DIY rose to the challenge admirably. I hope to see more like it in 2016. Good gaming!

Red Herrings and Reaction Rolls (Plus Kickstarters)

A couple of brief observations from my last game this past Saturday.

Reaction Rolls: These can be funky things. One NPC gets extreme positive reaction rolls – 11s and 10s – and the other negative ones – 4s and 5s – and you wind up with one accompanying the party and the other getting killed (after using Charm on the hobbit). It's kind of an inspired mechanic.

Red Herrings: I keep placing things in my dungeon that appear promising but are ultimately not useful in terms of finding treasure. In play, this can turn into a massive time sink. Players want the good treasure, so an area that appears like it might have treasure but doesn't can lead to a lot of time spent with no serious experience point gain.

So here are half a dozen ideas to spice them up:

1: Add a timer to the area. Rising water, sinking ceiling, clanking noise getting louder, treasure that only exists during the current planetary alignment, etc. Give the players ample notice and such timers can make their exploration at least much quicker.

2: Red herrings with teeth. This works especially well in D&D if it's a big, slow monster. The danger is that the players might think it has treasure and stand their ground for a fight, but the next group will know better.

3: It's a trap! Exploring too closely leads to various cave-ins, pit traps, arrow traps, explosions and flattenings. Especially good if there is a warning prior to the red herring area. For a fun variant, trap them inside and make escape a challenge.

4: Just wandering by. Increase your wandering monster rate in the red herring area so that it becomes prohibitive. Again, this has the disadvantage that too many player groups will try to fight it out.

5: Tell them it's a red herring. Mark off a torch or a flask of oil, let the players know they found nothing after diligent search, and get on with the game.

6: Fuck it, it's a special. Sure, you had planned on this being a time sink and nothing more, but they've spent long enough on it already. Grab your copy of The Dungeon Alphabet and throw the players a bone (roll 1d8 for type).

So with that said, I want to highlight the Kickstarter campaigns I'm currently backing.

Primeval Thule 5e is, well, a 5e campaign setting. It sold me quickly by listing "Conan and Cthulhu" as its reference points. Howard and Lovecraft are still big reasons why I game, and I think having a 5e book that supports this style will be really useful. I like Sasquatch Studios's material for 5e (Lost Mine of Phandelver, Princes of the Apocalypse), so I'm happy supporting this.

Metamorphosis Alpha: Epsilon City is Jim Ward's big city level for the Starship Warden. Followers of this blog know I'm a fan of MA, and I'm extremely happy to see that Goodman Games is putting out another adventure for the system. There are noises about expanded material and a boxed set, but the Kickstarter isn't exactly rolling along despite a fairly rapid start, so folks should get their pledges in already!

Ernest Gary Gygax Jr.'s Marmoreal Tomb Campaign Starter is a dungeon module by Ernie Gygax and Benoist Poiré. This one is growing quickly, with the Gygax name and some good press driving it. Benoist is a superb mapper whose work can be seen in issue #3 of the AFS zine and issue #3 of Gygax Magazine; he is doing all of the project's maps. Ernie is the son of E. Gary Gygax, and is writing this as a module in the tradition he learned from his father, as well as other luminaries like Rob Kuntz, in Lake Geneva. It's a wonderful project and I felt I simply had to back it.

One final note. I've been quietly using the Arduin Grimoire's critical hit chart without telling my players. It is monstrous, but I understand why people made so many imitations. I doubt whether I'll continue using it, but I always reserve the right to have it in my back pocket.

Old School Gaming in 2014 and Beyond

The year 2014 was a great one for old school gaming.

5e D&D, which I've run with some success, isn't an old school game, and even if it hadn't been released, it would still have been an excellent year for the old school. It's a reasonably good game that plays pretty close to how most of us played 2nd edition AD&D in the 1990s, with some tweaks from the 3e and 4e eras. Old school material is being published for 5e, including OSR authors going and adapting or creating material. It's all to the good; we need D&D to keep fresh blood coming in, and it's better to have a good edition than a bad one.

The overachiever in 2014 is Lamentations of the Flame Princess. The fact that the Free RPG Day adventure was nowhere near as good as last year's doesn't diminish at all the sheer volume of excellent output that LotFP had this year.

Releasing two modules as solid as Forgive Us and Scenic Dunnsmouth in a year would be more accomplishment than most publishers have in a year. The former is a work of art in presenting a module using only two-page spreads, while the latter puts the die-drop area generation method to good use. But then the December releases came out.

Again, just releasing a solid island adventure like The Idea from Space or an absolutely alien concept sandbox like No Salvation for Witches would also be a triumph. The two are seriously great high-concept modules, with NSFW probably taking the edge. And the December releases included great reissues of Tower of the Stargazer and Death Frost Doom. But they are all dwarfed by A Red & Pleasant Land.

RPL is Zak S's book based on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and, to some degree, Dracula. Rather than adapt these works to things already handled by D&D type gaming, it presents a way to adapt D&D type gaming to a bloodthirsty Eastern European land of madness. The book is packed with game-useful stuff, every bit of which is a challenge to the rote standard fantasy that predominates in the RPG industry. The book is a gauntlet thrown down to less imaginative concepts of what D&D can be, and it even has rules for dueling. (But you need to have a glove.)

LotFP has a heap of ambition for next year. Aside from the Referee Book, which I hope will be coming out next year, there are another half-dozen plus adventures and sourcebooks that are bursting with more amazing promise. Including the long-awaited follow-up to Carcosa by Geoffrey McKinney.

So what can compete with that? Goodman Games has been trying. They haven't released anything as revolutionary as RPL, but they have been doing some great stuff in publishing, most of it supported by Kickstarters. The KS for The Chained Coffin, an adventure set in a fantasy Appalachia written by Michael Curtis, turned into a deluxe boxed set that puts out a full setting worth of material. They wound up doing another KS that resulted in a similar treatment for Perils on the Purple Planet by Harley Stroh. This one is a sword & planet module.

Not to mention - Goodman did another Kickstarter for Metamorphosis Alpha that is suddenly turning it into a supported product line (you can see the line-up here). Just the special edition book is a terrific collection; the final result should make fans of MA jump up and down in celebration. Goodman's next deluxe edition will be of Grimtooth's Traps – the classic collection of Rube Goldberg traps that go over the top to slay the party.

Goodman is also releasing 5e modules. These are serviceable, but not much more; it's disappointing, when so much good stuff is going on in other areas, that they went pedestrian at a time when greatness was called for.

Basic Fantasy RPG has kept on keepin' on  This year saw several new print releases: Adventure Anthology 1, BFRPG Third Edition, and The Basic Fantasy Field Guide (a monster expansion). BFRPG has always been a labor of love, and where Lamentations and DCC are trying to do revolutionary things and present mind-blowing ideas, BFRPG presents the unvarnished real stuff of classic D&D. If you want a game that is steeped in the "classic" fantasy feel of '80s D&D, Basic Fantasy delivers exactly that.

The Adventure Anthology is a total mixed bag, of course, but it does offer good bits if you need to run D&D for a session. The Field Guide is fine, and is a mixed bag of monsters that needed to be adapted to BFRPG and innovative new creatures. There's going to be a new edition of BF1 Morgansfort coming shortly, which will update some of the adventures in that collection. Basic Fantasy has always tinkered with its older material, and in a certain sense it has become a distillation of the old religion of D&D.

Labyrinth Lord has been in a weird place for several years now. It's still the system of choice for megadungeons, and when the unbelievable happened and Dwimmermount was released earlier this year, it was for Labyrinth Lord and then ACKS. But Labyrinth Lord is more or less a shorthand for "yeah, this is compatible with B/X D&D" and has very much not been taking the lead in driving things forward. It's entered the long tail.

OSRIC never really wasn't in the long tail; its main purpose has always been to keep publishing 1e AD&D modules. It's kept that happening; if nobody else will, & Magazine and Expeditious Retreat Press will  keep new material going for as long as the 1e grognards are around.

Adventurer Conqueror King has been absolutely slammed by Dwimmermount. It caused a big stir when it was released, but it has really only had three significant releases since then: the Player's Companion, Domains at War and Dwimmermount. Of course, you could buy those and not need anything else for the next two years of gaming – so who's going to complain?

Swords & Wizardry is in an even weirder place. There is plenty of Swords & Wizardry material coming out from Frog God Games. Most of it is fine and old school in spirit – but it's all basically adaptations of Pathfinder products, and now Necromancer Games's 5e products. That was true before this year, but it's really become the main stream of new S&W material. Which means that it's more or less a side option for existing publishers, frankly.

There are plenty of other clones, but I think these are the ones driving most of what we see today in the old school gaming scene. It's not that I don't like Delving Deeper, or Seven Voyages of Zylarthen, or BLUEHOLME, but they're serving a niche of a niche.

One area where it's absolutely thriving are zines. Aside from James Maliszewski's Tékumel zine The Excellent Travelling Volume and long-running system neutral zines like Scott Moberly's AFS or Tim Shorts's The Manor, the games that are killing it with excellent zines aren't really that surprising.

Dungeon Crawl Classics: Crawl!, Metal Gods of Ur-Hadad, Crawljammer, Crawling Under a Broken Moon
Lamentations of the Flame Princess: The Undercroft, Vacant Ritual Assembly

It's hard to say what will happen in the future, but the momentum really seems to be with LotFP and DCC RPG. I see them as continuing to be the driving force. What would make 2015 an even greater year is if another publisher takes up the gauntlet that LotFP has thrown and tries to put out products that are as heavy on utility and as fresh in ideas.

What are D&D and the OSR? - A Couple of Reactions

A couple of quotes have made me want to write a kneejerk reaction. I don't like blogging from kneejerks but I think these make some good places to hang points I'd like to make.

John Wick said some dumb things in a blog post. But one of them is actually worth responding to.

The first four editions of D&D are not roleplaying games. You can successfully play them without roleplaying.

Which of course is nonsense. The term "role-playing game" was invented by people trying to describe what happened when they were playing Dungeons & Dragons. Any definition which doesn't include D&D is, prima facie, wrong.

But I'm going to submit that Holmes D&D – which definitely fits in the "first four editions" – is actually a really good roleplaying game, by Wick's criteria. You see, Holmes wrote on page 11 that monsters don't necessarily attack, but instead reactions should be determined on the reaction chart lifted from OD&D. Strictly speaking, this chart in OD&D is used to determine monster reactions to an offer made by the PCs, but Holmes changes it so that it refers directly to encounter reactions. This means that some monsters encountered in the Holmes edition of the game will be "friendly" and involve some negotiation. If the referee chooses to ignore that, it's not the D&D game's fault; it told the players to roleplay, right there in the text.

In fact, I would submit that this makes D&D a really good roleplaying game. Roleplaying is not just play-acting your character; it's negotiation as part of a strategy for surviving in a ridiculously lethal dungeon and getting out with treasure. By the book, in Holmes D&D, roleplaying is a required part of the game and, in fact, is a really good strategy. If you keep negotiating there is a 50/50 chance that you will get a positive result. The worst thing that can happen is that you're forced to fight.

Did people play D&D that way? A lot of them didn't. But a lot of people don't play Monopoly by the rules, either. It's just what happens when you have a really popular game. But D&D is distinctly a roleplaying game, even if you don't play it that way.

Then there's Ron Edwards, who makes a wonderful flamebait comment in an interview on the Argentine blog Runas Explosivas.

"Old school" is a marketing term and is neither old nor an identifiable single way to play (school).

In his novel Bleak House, Charles Dickens pithily described his use of old school as "a phrase generally meaning any school that seems never to have been young." It's part of why old school gaming has always been somewhat associated with the grognards, named after Napoleon's veterans who were infamous for grumbling, even to l'Empereur himself. People misunderstand "old school" to mean "the way that people played back in 197x or 198x" when it really means a re-emphasizing of certain "classic" tropes and ideas, including adventure design, mechanics, and play style.

The marketing aspect is interesting. I almost want to agree with it, in that it's primarily a label for people and products to denote that they are oriented to the "old school," but I disagree with its cynicism. The community aspect of the OSR, from blogs to G+ and the associated forums, has been probably more important overall than the marketing. You can bicker and argue over whether it's one single thing or a lot of things, but what you can't argue is that there are a lot of people in a network creating and consuming content.

Honestly the rest of Ron's interview isn't really worth much response. The OSR isn't that close to most Forge stuff when you get down to brass tacks. What happens in the game play experience is simply too different. Back in his heyday, Ron called the classic era of D&D a period of cargo cults, while I find it to have been far more creative and unrestrained. (That essay also contains his total misunderstanding of Gygax and Arneson, and application of the "Big Model" to their D&D.)

It's unfortunate, after eight years of doing this, that we are still at a high point of misunderstanding old school D&D from people who ought to know better. I've always found that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and old school D&D is a real thing, and in the OSR period it's been great roleplaying.

Two Copper Pieces on OSR History

Erik Tenkar has been writing guides to the OSR games out there. For his trouble, he's being accused of historical revisionism by the "RPG Pundit," a person who you may remember from "consultant-gate." Erik's post about it is here. I won't link to the Pundit's site but you can find the post by Googling his pseudonym.

The attack on Tenkar is based on the idea that the early / close retro-clones weren't really the font from which the old school renaissance came. Which is malarkey. The OSR became a single thing in 2009, when Dan Proctor made it one.

A history of the OSR can start in dozens of places. You can start in Dragonsfoot, with gamers who never really stopped playing AD&D or B/X D&D getting together to talk shop. Or you can start with Hackmaster, which put 1e back into print (albeit in a strangely modified form). Or with Castles & Crusades, which created a lot of the pressure for these games. Or you could look at Necromancer Games with its "First Edition Feel" and 3e reprints of Judges Guild products, or Goodman Games's Dungeon Crawl Classics series. Or you could look at WotC's early PDF releases, which included OD&D for a hot minute.

There were literally dozens of things contributing to an old school explosion in the mid-2000s. The RPG Pundit bizarrely chooses to look at two oddball projects. One, Mazes & Minotaurs, was an attempt to imagine what D&D might have been like with an ancient Greek flavor. The other, Encounter Critical, was an attempt to pawn off a fake late '70s RPG. EC has had some influence on the OSR, because Jeff Rients loves the thing. But I've never detected any real influence coming from M&M, and as someone who minored in ancient Greek and Roman history in college, I would be able to tell.

The problem with looking at it from the influences is that events like the OSR are not unitary things. No single event happened and then the OSR was on; it was more that several things were happening in parallel, and they only happened to be grouped together later. The old school buildup wasn't a single powder keg; it was several smaller fires that later merged, and later still drifted apart in ways.

But the most important events were the publication of BFRPG and OSRIC, because they changed things fundamentally. Once BFRPG and AA#1 Pod-Caverns of the Sinister Shroom were in print, there were now rules and adventures resembling those of the late 1970s and early 1980s, with no apologies, no parody elements, no conversion to 3e or a "modernized" system. RPG products that were old school as a badge of pride.

OSRIC and BFRPG were fundamentally different. OSRIC was something of a fig-leaf, a system designed to be indistinguishable from AD&D so that you could use modules for OSRIC with your AD&D books with no conversion. There was no assuption that people would play OSRIC; in fact, there were at least 20 modules released before it was available in print. BFRPG, by contrast, was a community project meant to be played, B/X with a light clean-up to a few rules.

What was important was that the barrier was breached in the summer of 2006, and that's when the flood of material that we can now identify as part of the OSR started to happen.  The Hoard & Horde spreadsheet by Guy Fullerton makes it abundantly clear that things changed significantly at that exact point in time. Any history that doesn't frankly say that before BFRPG and OSRIC there wasn't what we identify today as OSR publication, and afterward there is, is being revisionist.

The derisive mentions of "clone-mania" and "Talmudic" interpretation of rules and Gygaxian minutiae make it quite clear what the Pundit's revisionist agenda is. He doesn't like the wing of the OSR represented by that play style, that sticks close to the old games instead of remixing them and re-imagining them. Ironically this misses a big chunk of the point of OSRIC and BFRPG, which has always been to get adventures and support material out there for these older systems. There are three hardback collections on my shelf of Advanced Adventures collections; each contains 10 complete OSRIC modules. BFRPG just released a book of adventures in print. Neither gives much of a damn about history or precise accuracy.

BFRPG wanted to get people playing old school B/X style games again, and it succeeded. OSRIC wanted to get new support material for original AD&D, and it succeeded. These are admirable goals, rooted in actual play and the continuity of a gaming community that are worthwhile in themselves. The OSR should be proud to say these games are where our prehistory ends and our history begins.

A Note to OSR Adventure Designers

This is a simple note to people who write OSR adventures.

DON'T USE BOXED TEXT OR READ-ALOUD TEXT IN MODULES.

I listened to a long review on the Save or Die Podcast (a podcast I enjoy very much) talking about an intriguing module/mini-setting called Whisper & Venom. The SoD crew waxed poetic about the art, the maps, the production values, the boxed set, the hardcover, the adventure and NPCs and locations; but they said two words that killed it for me: boxed text.

I don't care if it's a TSR module or OSR module; I don't care who wrote it, or what ideas it has. I will not run a module that contains programmed text meant to be read aloud by the referee. I'm no longer going to buy or support modules that I know contain read-aloud text from OSR publishers. It's a holdover from tournament modules, which aren't fit for campaign use, and should not be used as a model for designing adventures today.

Read-aloud text should never have been a part of an exploration game. The whole concept of D&D is that player characters are discovering what is in a previously unknown environment through their characters' actions. Either read-aloud text is made of clues about the room, in which case it has to be listened to carefully and parsed line-by-line by players, or it doesn't and it is just a waste of time. If I'm running a module, I need a concise description of the room that I can convey to the players as their characters explore it. All clues should be in the room description, not some in the boxed text and others buried in the other description paragraph.

This is a foot-down issue for me. It's 2014! Stop making modules with boxed text.

Crowdfunding Excitement & Oddities

My crowdfunding "score" when it comes to roleplaying games is pretty low, but it's looking like it's more likely to become better in the next month or two, as a bunch of things have been inching toward printing and distribution. Of course I keep digging holes faster than creators can fill them. Here's some notes on the crowdfunding campaigns that are currently out there.

The one I'm really jazzed about is LotFP Free RPG Day 2014. This started off focused on Jim Raggi's 2014 Free RPG Day adventure but has turned into a stealth campaign for a module called "World of the Lost" by Rafael Chandler. It's a sandbox that is at least 48 pages but, if it sells 250 copies, will be substantially bigger and better. There's only 40 hours to sell another 100+ copies - but the reward is really great if we get it. The module promises to be a "lost world" style sandbox from the freakish imagination that brought us the Teratic Tome.

I'm a bit undecided on the Kickstarter for Scarlet Heroes by Kevin Crawford. I rather like what I have of Crawford's products - An Echo, Resounding, Red Tide and Spears of the Dawn - and I think that Scarlet Heroes will probably be good. It's just that the format of the Kickstarter is a turnoff for me, because it just gets you an "at cost" print on demand version. I would rather only pay once for the book, and as much as I think I'll like it that means I'm inclined to wait for it to be released officially, as I did with Crawford's other products.

Then there's Greg Gillespie's Barrowmaze Complete. I like Barrowmaze but I have both books, and I'm not terrifically inclined to shell out $80 for a bit more content. Again I'm inclined to pass and just pick up poster maps since the ones in the printed books are absolutely awful.

Is anything else going on? Any other thoughts folks have on these three campaigns?

Kickstarting Madness

So if you've gotten some holiday cash or just have money and want to throw it at some creative projects, here are a few things going around the OSR that I wanted to highlight. I know I don't usually shill for things but with 2014 coming around the corner, I thought this would also be a good way to showcase some things I like that should be out next year.

The Islands of Purple-Haunted Putrescence by Venger Satanis.

This one still hasn't reached its funding goal. Venger Satanis is best known for his previous module, Liberation of the Demon Slayer, a dungeon crawl; this one is an island module. The KS is $1,149 short of its $3,500 goal, but really I'd like to see it at least hit $5,000 and the first stretch goal - getting everyone involved a longer module. The current length of 32 pages is still a bit shy of what I'd prefer. But I think there's a good deal of potential here, and I'd like to see the module at least fund. It's high gonzo - space aliens, demons, Lovecraftian entities, fantasy tropes all mixed up in one big weird package.

Or as Venger puts it:

Specifically, adventurers will explore three islands in close proximity that have been visited by a wyrm-riding empire, extra-dimensional invaders, space aliens, Elves, Dwarves, Humans, and more. They'll find black pylons enabling time/space travel, an devil-god worshiping temple of extra-dimensional properties, a shattered dome city, and most importantly, The Thing That Rots From The Sky!

So what are you waiting for?

The World of Calidar. This is Bruce Heard's new project, a setting explored through skyship-related fiction like his "Princess Ark" series in Dragon Magazine that dealt with Mystara. This is a generic setting/fiction related product, and while I'm not often for gamer fiction, I do think Heard's work is a good way to establish a setting. And it has skyships! This has already funded and is pressing on towards stretch goals.

An Illustrated Bestiary of Fantastic Creatures. This is a project by an illustrator named Casey Sorrow that goes right after my heart: a richly illustrated bestiary for old school games. Sorrow lists the inspirational illustrators as "David C. Sutherland III, David A. Trampier, Tom Wham, and Jean Wells" - so you can get a feeling this is going to be a good one. Although really, our squid-type friend to the right should've told you that right off the bat. No stretch goals for this one but it's moving towards its finish line, with $970 out of $1600 raised so far.

One of the reasons I am promoting all of these Kickstarters is that they are relatively modest goals, with good pricing points and realistic expectations from the project creators. There are no stretch goals that will bankrupt creators, and the projects are manageable rather than epic products that will bog the authors down. You get the book for Venger's module at $20, a softcover book for Calidar at $25 (or the book plus a poster map at $35), and the Bestiary is a mere $16. So check them out and get your old school on for 2014!

A Proposal: OSR Compatible

I've been slowly working on a few things, and one issue that has come up is - what system should everything be compatible with? The early OSR clones started as ways to produce material compatible with AD&D (OSRIC) or B/X D&D (Basic Fantasy and Labyrinth Lord). But now there is a proliferation of clones that are played on their own. Each has some amalgamation of rules differences from the next, including armor class and similar concerns. Little or none of these make much difference in the long run.

Because I have it handy, here's a stat block from B2 Keep on the Borderlands:
AC 7, HD 1, hp 4 each, #AT 1, D 1-6, Save F 1, ML 8.

Also handy is a stat block from N1 Against the Cult of the Reptile God:
AC 5; MV 12"; HD 2; hp 10 each; #AT 1; D 1-6

The first is a B/X module, the second an AD&D module - the B/X line actually has a bit more information. What I'd propose is that, instead of indicating compatibility with say OSRIC or Labyrinth Lord or Swords & Wizardry or any other particular clone, OSR games use a generic standard compatibility as follows:

Monster Name & number appearing - Monster's name with the number appearing in parentheses afterward.

Armor Class (AC) - give the descending AC. Different games with ascending AC use different bases, so it's not useful to list ascending ACs. There will be a slight difficulty where an unarmored person with a shield would be AC 9 in AD&D and AC 8 in B/X D&D, but this isn't big enough to worry about.

Movement rate (MV) - listed in feet, i.e. 120' rather than 12". Easy enough for OD&D and AD&D players to drop the 0; scale inches tend to confuse things.

Dexterity (Dx) - listed 3-18. This is for several games which use Dexterity to break ties in initiative (or Holmes D&D and its clones that use them to determine it in the first place).

Hit Dice (HD) - number of hit dice. Optionally this can include B/X style * for special abilities.

Hit points (hp) - a number of hit points. This should be in every stat block. List multiple creatures as "a,b,c,d" or "x each."

Number of Attacks (# AT) - the number of attacks per round.

Damage (D) - this is listed as a range, i.e. 1-6 or 2-7. Multiple attacks should be listed sequentially with "/" between each, such as 1-3/1-3/1-6.

Special Attacks (SA) - list any special attacks.

Special Defenses (SD) - list any special defenses.

Save - this is listed as a class and level. Typically monsters save as a fighter of level equal to their hit dice.

Morale (ML) - morale rating from 2 to 12. 12 is the highest morale rating and indicates least likely to flee.

So the first monster listing from B1 In Search of the Unknown would look like this:
Orcs (4) - AC 6, MV 90', Dx 8, HD 1, hp 5,4,3,2, #AT 1, D 1-6, Save F1, ML 8

The black widow spider would look like this:
Black Widow Spider (1) - AC 6, MV 60' (in web 120'), Dx 15, HD 3*, hp 13, #AT 1, D 2-12, SA poison, Save F2, ML 8

Write-ups for monsters would include all of the above plus Intelligence. Treasure type would have to be determined by the individual referee; it's too disparate across games.

I'd really like to make "OSR Compatible" a thing. Maybe someone with better Photoshop skills than I would be able to make up some kind of logo and release it open-source? I'd like to put it on my own future releases including Dungeon Crawl #4. Also - any additions or changes would be welcome.

Has the OSR mostly embraced thieves?

In the earliest days of the OSR, a number of people didn't care for thieves. Read through this thread on Grognardia from 2008, and it becomes clear that a lot of people (including me) didn't really care for them. I think a good chunk of the reason was in Philotomy's musing about thieves and thief skills (you can find all of Philotomy here, it's a great read if you haven't gone through it yet), which posed it as a live question.

With more games being based closer to B/X D&D, and with Swords & Wizardry Complete taking on more prominence, the thief has snuck back into the game without much protest. Lamentations of the Flame Princess and Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea both remove percentiles as a way to not make thieves so bad at everything, but many games stick with the thief skills pretty much on the model of Supplement I: Greyhawk.

I have a thief in my Stonehell game, and he's pretty well played. Not to mention lucky - he may have failed a bunch of saving throws, but rolled a 20 when he took a jet of save-or-die poison gas to the face. I kind of like having a lightly armored character in the dungeon, but I don't think the thief class is the best way to get that. Thief skill percentages are awful until high level, and it's more fun to do trap detection by narration anyway.

It seems to me that, in a game without thieves, magic-users should have a bigger niche. Classically the M-U's main job is to cast sleep once (unless the player went and memorized something else; charm person is ok too, but magic missile seems like it was mostly meant to cause players to waste their spells) and then hide behind the fighters and clerics; in return she (gender choice in honor of Azraiel, an M-U who recently perished in my Stonehell game) will be blasting things with fireballs and lightning bolts once she reaches 5th level.

But the magic-user seems to me to be well suited to recon, particularly once she reaches 3rd level. Then she can cast invisibility on herself, and use sleep or charm as a failsafe if she gets in a spot of trouble. By contrast, a thief who gets caught loses his whole advantage since he can't backstab once he's been seen. Magic-users are lightly armored and so have their full movement rates in tact.

I think this doesn't play out as much as it should because M-U players value every scrap of experience they get towards being able to nuke enemies with fireballs. But that doesn't really call for a thief, and I want to discuss the possibility with the players next time I run OD&D.

Now, I think that if you're playing AD&D the magic-user/thief is actually pretty good. Extra HP and weapon use, backstab damage and only half a level behind, plus the thief levels keep going up after the elf hits the M-U level cap.

But in an OD&D or classic D&D game, or their simulacra and genetically modified clones, do we really need the embrace the thief has gotten?

Goings on in the OSR

Since my regular game got postponed AGAIN, I wanted to take the time to post some things about what's been going on in the old school renaissance lately.

You can buy Jim Raggi's module Better Than Any Man in PDF from RPGNow for any price you want, including free. I backed this module on Kickstarter so I'm hardly an impartial judge, but it is seriously impressive. I got my copy at Free RPG Day and was thinking of writing a review, except that reviews aren't a regular part of this blog and I don't really intend to start. This is a detailed sandbox module with a central town, several dungeon settings, and a built-in timer so PCs can't lollygag through the plot. This is a trend with Raggi, who wrote The God That Crawls to have a dungeon race instead of a dungeon crawl. It also has a number of new spells that you really do not want to ever have to use. All magic in LotFP seems double-edged.

I really like BTAM's sandbox style of presentation. The module has loads of plot in it, but there is nary a drop of railroading to be found. All the plot has to be emergent from players interacting with the world. Now, there are two things that are less than comfortable in the module - one, it more or less encourages roleplaying out some debauchery in the section about the Joy in Karlstadt, which is honestly a bit juvenile. Two, it does a two-page spread making cannibalism explicit, which seems gratuitous. But Raggi has worked out a niche where épater la bourgeoisie (shock the middle-classes) is a commandment, so at this point it's just expected that something unsavory will be in there.

I'd like to play the module specifically because the second half (the dungeons) make the first half (the town) feel mostly like a bit of a red herring, and I want to see if that is borne out in play. Oh, and if you get to the end, a near-TPK is inevitable.

Then there is Scott Moberly's AFS zine, issue 3. This is a print-only zine that has two adventures, some monsters and magic items, some fiction and a couple of articles, all in a sword & sorcery vibe. You have to get this issue, if only because of Benoist Poiré's module. Scott put the map up online, and it is gorgeous. Look:

Probably one of my absolute favorite dungeon maps since The Original Bottle City, which is another gorgeous thing. Benoist's module is written in a "this is how I used it, this is how you might use it" fashion which I'm not sold on, mostly because the "how you might use it" (called IYC for In Your Campaign) notes would have done better as a single section rather than repeating on every single room description. But it's a fresh, clever module with some really wild ideas in it. But I swear, I could buy a book full of maps that look that great. Even without any keys, it'd be worth every penny.

One other thing I wanted to comment on. A recent game called Monsters & Magic came out that tries to add some "modern" mechanics to a game that is old-school. Which isn't a bad thing, but it bills itself as an OSR game - and it's not. To me, the OSR is more about play than the trappings. We have hardcore sword & sorcery, horror, gonzo science fantasy and high-magic, post-apocalyptic, all kinds of flavors but have remained clustered around play that you could reasonably say comes from a TSR-centric pre-1986 mold, even when using post-1986 materials like the Rules Cyclopedia. M&M, to me, misses this point in the OSR, by trying to keep some trappings but fundamentally change the play.

None of this is to knock the game or its creators. I haven't played it, and it looks like it's fun if that is your bag. But it's really made me think about what being part of the OSR means, and I think more than anything it means a shared set of assumptions about the way we play.

Finally there's what is coming up. Dwimmermount should come out in the next few months, and Stonehell; it's not just because I'm running the latter that I like it better as a megadungeon. LotFP has a lot due in late July, with its Rules & Magic hardcover, Vincent Baker's Seclusium of Orphone of the Three Visions and Kenneth Hite's Qelong adventure. We should be nearing a penultimate issue of Fight On!, and my own Dungeon Crawl should be releasing around the beginning of August.

So that's what I've got about the OSR. I'm curious what other folks have found interesting and/or are looking forward to.

Some goings on in the OSR

I will probably not be posting anything major until after this weekend, although I should have some fresh thoughts on OD&D from after the setting post series and the PDF up in tomorrow's posting. Today I wanted to get a little bit into the OSR and things that I find interesting ... or not.

As an enthusiast of monster books, I want to point folks over to Joseph Bloch's Kickstarter for the Adventures Dark and Deep Bestiary. This KS is really important to me, looking at a 450 page book with over 900 monsters. Every $25 pays for a piece of black & white art that will go in the book. We're up over 200 illustrations, but I want this thing to be lavish with every monster depicted. Joseph is really top-notch in terms of handling his publications and got the Adventures Dark and Deep Players Manual out early, so please consider backing this one.

Second, I think folks should check out Geoffrey McKinney's Dungeon of the Unknown. This was one of the rewards for Jim Raggi's LotFP Free RPG Day Kickstarter, but it's now available in PDF for money. It's another dungeon inspired partly by B1 In Search of the Unknown, as was Caverns of Temeluc in Dungeon Crawl #2. It features goop monsters, chimeric creatures (monsters in the vein of Isle of the Unknown, treasures, weird locations, and human factions that the referee is then to stock in a 2-level Geomorph style dungeon. Everything in it scales pretty well up or down in level, except for the values of the treasure - which I think are a bit skimpy.

Geoffrey has also published a third module in his Psychedelic Fantasies line, The Fungus That Came to Blackeswell. I've been picking up each of these unique modules, and this one is an interesting underground village that has some really cool monsters lurking within. I'd recommend checking out at least one of these, if not all three adventures.

Finally - the OSR got mentioned on BoingBoing, in this article. Unfortunately it's crap, and tries to pawn off old school gaming as a simple obsession with "how things used to be" - when an objective glance at the community shows that it's actually a riotous diversity of people whose games have starting points from editions of D&D released sometime between 1974 (OD&D) and 1991 (Rules Cyclopedia).

I think at this point our community has more to do with exploring the roads that could have been traveled but weren't, from S&W Complete and LL/AEC making the "AD&:D Lite" that a lot of people would have preferred, to Joseph Bloch creating an extrapolation of "2e if Gary did it" to games like ACKS that explore the endgame. Even megadungeon publications focus on a style of module that never got done well rather than rehashing. There are some middle of the road modules, and there always will be, but I think the OSR has evolved into something far beyond nostalgia and it's a shame that it isn't really understood.

Of course all of these feeds back into why I think OD&D still matters, and why I still think its re-publication in PDF form was an important event in the OSR. But that's for tomorrow.

Old school gaming: better than ever!

Obviously I'm very happy that the second issue of Dungeon Crawl is now available, and hopefully in the coming days we'll see a couple of reviews from bloggers who I've sent copies, and maybe some from the kind folks who've bought them so far. If you check the product page you'll also see that submissions for issue 3 are open for the next two months, so send in your ideas!

Another thing I'm really excited about is Petty Gods. I missed out on submitting an entry when James Maliszewski was running it, but I will have an entry in what Gorgonmilk is currently calling "Expanded Petty Gods (XPG)." A goddess I wrote is going in the same book as something by Michael Moorcock? Crazy awesome. I am so high fiving my teenage self after the time I spent Spring Break plowing through the Ace editions of the six Elric books.

Petty Gods, I think, is symbolic of where things are going in a few ways. First, it's a great community project, and I've always thought that the appeal of the old school renaissance was that we were a community. With Fight On! and Grognardia both sunsetting for all intents and purposes, we've lost big places where that community used to share its ideas, but we have a Google+ group with 1,358 members who can share ideas, discuss games and even play them online. That's even better.

I do have to mention the project that has been the subject of so much discussion around the RPG world, James M's Dwimmermount. This seemed in danger of becoming a project forever stuck in beta, but things have been turned around and it's great to say that it's going to be Open Gaming Content. That's cool if for no other reason than the maps are actually pretty good, even if the dungeon itself manages to miss the mark on the megadungeon having levels that are simply weird and wondrous. Plus the draft will be substantially updated by the folks at Autarch.

Another thing is the reach of the clones, which I'll have more to say about on Swords & Wizardry Appreciation Day. With Basic Fantasy we are literally at the point where $4.62 gets you all the rules you need to play for 20 levels and three adventures are available for $3.59, leaving you with a very complete basic D&D-style package for $8.21, with free shipping. That's pretty amazing. And suffice it to say that I think Swords & Wizardry Complete is a game I think has serious merit.

We are now at the point where a community creation comes out like the Hexenbracken not in months or years, but a couple of days (there's a version here where you can click the hexes to see the description). It's wild and wacky but seriously you could put that thing out as a supplement and it'd be pretty high quality.

Old school gaming is going in a heck of a direction, and I'm really excited about some of the stuff we've seen. And to be a part of what's going on today. If you or someone you know has a project that you're excited about, feel free to talk about it in the comments.

We've had the Renaissance - What Now?

It was already two and a half years ago that Jim Raggi proclaimed that the OSR is better than TSR. Now Joseph Bloch is announcing OSR Phase II, claiming again that the OSR has come into its own. I think the question deserves some discussion.

I think that Joseph is right that the first phase is past. We've already had the rebirth of old school gaming. I think that this came through the retro-clones and the virtual rediscovery of OD&D and the exploration of old school play beyond the standard AD&D tournament dungeons. This brought methods of gaming and ideas for how rules should be structured back from the realm of the die-hard grognards (which I joined for a while back in high school). So I don't see the "renaissance" term as being really appropriate at this point. We are at a point of old school gaming, and as always the play is the thing. Hence the subtitle change on this blog.

Of course the OSR will continue to be a logo and so forth, just like Tactical Studies Rules was not a tactical wargame company but TSR continued as a brand for decades. But we're at a period where these things are relevant beyond our little circles, where Gary Gygax's sons are lending their names to a print magazine and the best seller on RPGNow is the Moldvay Basic D&D rulebook, and the next version of D&D has to pay attention to old school mentality and try to win players of that style back. Old school gaming is a thing in the RPG scene. Hardly the only thing, but we've carved out something and that's valuable.

For me, that means that the epoch of the retro-clone is over. It's no longer enough to restate the rules of any version of D&D or any other older RPG, or really to put out derivative dungeons that are like the tournaments of old. We have those now - in PDF, cheap, not just for collectors like me who don't mind paying more for a 30 year old adventure than I would for a brand new one. (Not that PDF ever stopped a good collection before.) Clones are more ambitious, but like Adventurer Conqueror King they retain the bad habit of restating the whole rulebook to change a handful of things. I think that's something we need to overcome.

In terms of product support things have been up and down. Settings are relatively a weak point, although the truth has always been that most gamers make their own settings, so this is understandable. I think there's more space for cities and villages, and for "city kits" like Vornheim, than for settings proper. I don't think there is too much room for more settings unless they are aiming for uniqueness like the Red Tide setting. (Isle of the Unknown is an exception; I consider it more of a collection of encounters than a setting as such.) I've already gone over megadungeons which I think tells most of what I'm interested in at this point in terms of adventure modules.

What I think we're really missing is the monster books. There were two relatively early products that were successful monster books, Monsters of Myth and Malevolent & Benign. Since then where are the volumes of new creatures? The Swords & Wizardry monster book had a few good offerings but it's been pretty dry territory. I think this is a shame, as there is a pressing need for more quality monsters, especially unique creatures over generic humanoids - even though we could really use some novel ones of those. How many kobolds, goblins, orcs, hobgoblins, bugbears, and gnolls have met their ends at the hands of adventurers?

That's a project I want to find people willing to collaborate on. I think if we do it right, there could be another really excellent book of monsters, and I want to elaborate a bit more on that in my next post. If a monster book gets off the ground, I would really like to follow up with a project like Petty Gods that would actually get off the ground. But one thing at a time. Next: monster book.

Megadungeons as publishing projects

I'm still working on my "state of the OSR" post, which will come out in the next couple of days. But I wanted to comment on something that is becoming more and more important in the world of independent old school publishing: the megadungeon. The whole debate over Dwimmermount resulted in this thread at theRPGSite, which in turn really got me thinking. (My comment on that thread is as Cadriel, the name I use on most RPG boards.)

For me, the great appeal of megadungeons is not a long series of levels, even if they are relatively well jaquayed. It's the wondrous levels; Castle Greyhawk is not the center of so many imaginations because it's so many levels deep but because it's got the truly strange beneath it, like Bottle City, the Machine Level, the Black Reservoir, the Garden of the Plantmaster, the portals to weird places; it's not just a big dungeon, it's a complex where the payoff is quite big. And it's full of things like the Great Stone Face that just capture the imagination.

The attempts to publish megadungeons so far have not been overwhelming. Stonehell was a neat dungeon, and there are some really good bits in its five levels, but it doesn't really transcend the "standard" dungeon levels. Similarly Dwimmermount, which is only in draft, is far from awful for a vanilla fantasy dungeon, but at the same time nothing so far hits that "amazing" button that really needed to be pushed to reward players for adventuring so long in one ruined pile. (This review is useful for non-backers; I think it's too harsh but has some good points.) Anomalous Subsurface Environment goes too far for me in the other direction; so much of the science fantasy that it becomes passé. I do think that some balance is required.

When I came to the OSR, one of the things I thought a lot about was what we needed to be putting out as a community. The answer has been "dungeon modules." That makes a certain kind of sense, and I'll admit that I like buying and reading dungeon modules; I have an extensive collection of TSR, Judges Guild and OSR modules that I enjoy perusing. For most of them, though, I don't see myself running the things. One exception is Robert J. Kuntz's Original Bottle City, which I've played in. It's a shame that the book is hard to find, as it's IMO the best thing to come out of the recent wave of publishing, specifically because it's something that is meant to be worked into your own dungeon and not provide you with a "site and plot" as many dungeons do.

As I put it in the RPGSite thread, I think what we need is less people trying to publish their megadungeon. It's an arduous task to try and run somebody else's massive campaign dungeon for a prolonged period of time; the only one I could see gaining a lot of traction is Gary Gygax's Castle Greyhawk. Instead, what I would really like is a "megadungeon kit": some of the really cool sub-levels and concepts put out into a product that highlights just the "good stuff." This would be better for DMs slotting into their own campaigns, and the kind of thing that would work really well as one-shot or convention material as well.

There are 3 things that I think would be useful as part of this. One is really good dungeon entrances - opportunities to do caverns, abandoned mines, old ruins etc that serve as quality introductions, and can be used to lead to a larger dungeon. This is good for getting PCs up to 2nd or 3rd level before they hit the dungeon proper, so that they can have enough HPs that exploration is really viable. Second is the "special" levels - what's Dwimmermount's Bottle City or even its Machine Level? These are the kind of thing that deserve a room-by-room full detail, not every single chamber in a 500+ room dungeon. As impressive of a feat as that is, it's going to get kind of repetitive.

And third and last, is a "greatest hits" of the other levels. If level 2 could be done by sticking entries from Monster & Treasure Assortment into Dungeon Geomorphs maps except for 3 rooms, give us what's in those 3 rooms. Why add 50+ variations on empty rooms, giant rats and 2000 cp when you really want to highlight a few really great tricks, traps and monsters? Heck, I wouldn't even object to an Undermountain-style product where the whole map is provided but most of it is "fill it in yourself" except for the special areas. Which after all hearkens back to the suggested method of filling a dungeon in OD&D.

That's my take on publishing megadungeons as we are in January 2013. I most certainly welcome somebody proving me wrong by publishing a 500+ room megadungeon where I feel it wouldn't have worked if every single room description wasn't in the book, but I'd also love to see a project like the one I lay out above.

Returning to blogging

So to start: in the last year, my gaming time has been severely limited. Since the experiment of doing Dungeon Crawl #1 I have moved into a house and celebrated the birth of my daughter – so it's been a fairly busy time - unfortunately with little time for gaming. Since I'm working up to get a new campaign going, it's high time I start blogging again.

I'm working on a longer post about the state of the Old School Renaissance and why this blog's subtitle is now different. I don't want to get into that with the post where I talk about coming back. But broadly my goal is to continue to flesh out a historical-minded look at play styles and actual play, just as it's always been.

One thing I do want to say is that Dungeon Crawl #1 is now available for free download at the link below.

Dungeon Crawl #1

It will no longer be offered as a print-and-mail zine. It was a fun experiment but I don't think I can offer the content frequently enough to make it worth everyone's while. I hope folks enjoy the zine and get some mileage out of the material in it.

And that's that! I'm looking forward to getting back to this and sounding off - 2013 should be an interesting year.