Ye Olde Fantasy: Family Matters

Here is a series of tables to generate an immediate family for your player character in a pseudo-medieval fantasy setting. This assumes you are using Ye Olde Fantasy: Social Status, but if not, replace any social modifier roll with a character’s Charisma modifier or any equivalent the table deems appropriate.

Parentage

Roll a d20 on the following table(s) to determine the character’s parentage status.

d20	Parentage
1-10	Both parents raised the character.
11-14	One parent is missing. Roll on the Cause of Absence table. Also, roll on the Single Parent table.
15-17	One parent is dead. Roll on the Cause of Death table. Also, roll on the Single Parents table.
18-19	Both parents are dead. Roll on the Cause of Death table, optionally twice. Also, roll on the No Parents table.
20	Roll on the Unusual Circumstance table.

Cause of Death

Roll on this when you need to determine a cause of death for a family member.

d20	Cause of Death
1	Heart attack or other heart disease
2	Common illness, such as the flu
3	Infection
4	Work-related accident
5	Battle-related wounds (either by participating in combat, or being mugged)
6	Starvation
7	Weather
8	Plague or uncommon disease
9	Drowning
10	Poison, such as accidental ingestion or contact
11	Fire
12	Fall from heights
13	Domestic accident or manslaughter
14	Childbirth (reroll if not appropriate)
15	Execution
16	Animal-related, domesticated, or wild
17	Alcohol poisoning
18	Suicide
19	Murder, most likely by a rival
20	Roll on the Unusual Cause of Death Table

d20	Unusual Cause of Death
1	Blasted by magic
2	Teleported to the underworld
3	Cursed by a witch or warlock
4	Magical or rare beast attack
5	Sacrificed to a Chaos cult
6	Fell into a magical rift
7	Transformed into a frog, eaten by a dog
8	Killed by spirits
9	Mistook a Mimic for an ordinary item
10	Turned to stone, shattered
11	Died from Potion Overdose
12	Fell into the sky
13	Murdered by humanoid monsters
14	Contracted lycanthropy, executed by monster hunters
15	Suffered magical backlash from a nearby Wizard’s failed spell
16	Absorbed by a magical artifact, such as a mirror or soul-eating sword
17	Drained by a vampire
18	Spontaneously combusted
19	Aged in reverse until ceasing to exist
20	Dropped dead for no apparent reason

Cause of Absence

Roll on the following table to learn why a character’s family member was absent.

d12	Cause of Absence
1	Unknown, just went missing
2	Affair related departure
3	Imprisoned
4	Seeking a cure for a disease
5	On a long religious pilgrimage
6	Exploring unknown lands
7	Disappeared during a natural disaster, such as a flood
8	Seeking a cure to a disease
9	Exiled for political reasons
10	Banished for religious reasons
11	Joined a religious order
12	Roll on the Unusual Absence Table

d12	Unusual Cause of Absence
1	Lost in the Realm of Fairies
2	Kidnapped by humanoid monsters
3	Enthralled by a vampire
4	Abducted by a flying monster, such as a dragon or griffin
5	Joined a Chaos cult
6	Sucked into the amulet of a warlock or witch
7	Fell into an enchanted, unending slumber
8	Caught in a time loop, continually relives the same period over and over but unable to break out of it
9	Attained some form of religious enlightenment, taken fully formed into the heavens
10	Spirit separated from the body, either through magic or permanent astral projection
11	Turned to stone
12	Transformed into a toad

Single Parent

Roll on the following table to determine if your parent remarried:

d20 + SOC	Parent Remarriage
1-12	Parent did not remarry
13-20	Parent remarried

If the parent remarried, treat the character’s background as if both parents had raised them.

If they did not remarry, roll on the following Single Parent table:

d20	Single Parent SOC <= 0	SOC = +1	SOC = +2	SOC = +3
1-5	Raised by parent	Raised by parent	Raised by parent	Raised by parent
6-8	Fostered by a family member or neighbor	Fostered by another family member	Fostered by another family member	Raised by parent
9-11	Adopted by another peasant family	Adopted by another family	Fostered by a guild member	Fostered by another notable family
12-14	Adopted by a religious institute, such as a monastery	Fostered by a guild member	Fostered in a religious institution	Fostered by a high-ranking clergy member
15-17	Adopted by a social institute, such as an orphanage	Fostered by a village or town official	Fostered by an academic or notable village/town official	Fostered by an important town official or notable academic
18-20	Fended for self as an abandoned urchin	Fostered by a religious institute, such as a monastery	Fostered as a page or squire with a bachelor knight	Fostered as a page or squire with an honorable knight

Note that fostered children are highly likely to know their birth parents, while adopted children are unlikely to.

No Living Parents

Roll on the following No Parents table to determine the status of your character’s upbringing:

d20	No Parents SOC <= 0	SOC = +1	SOC = +2	SOC = +3
1-5	Adopted by another family	Adopted by another family	Adopted by another family	Adopted by another family
6-8	Adopted by an orphanage	Adopted by a guild member	Adopted by an important guild member	Adopted by another family
9-11	Adopted by a monastery	Adopted by an honorable knight	Adopted by a notable monastery	Adopted by a prestigious religious institute
12-14	Adopted by a traveling group, such as roaming actors	Adopted by a merchant	Adopted by an academic	Adopted by an important scholar
15-17	Communally raised in a community	Adopted by a village or town official	Adopted by a notable village or town official	Adopted by a low-ranking member of the gentry
18-20	Fended for self as an abandoned urchin	Adopted by a low ranking member of the gentry	Adopted by a low-ranking member of the gentry	Adopted by an important town official

Unusual Circumstances

Roll on the following table to determine your character’s particularly notable upbringing. Many of these get pretty fantastical, so feel free to restrict it to just the first six or so if you are playing a more grounded campaign or don’t want the PCs starting with more fantastical upbringings.

d20	Unusual Upbringing
1	Bastard of a higher-ranking noble
2	Bastard of a notable religious figure
3	Adopted by the community’s wise person
4	Raised in a religious cult’s commune
5	Raised by wild animals
6	Adopted by a wandering adventurer
7	Adopted by a wizard
8	Magically aged to an adult
9	Wandered into a haunted location, raised by ghosts or spirits
10	Immaculately conceived
11	Was a spirit or fae-being who was condemned to live as a mortal
12	Descendent of divine or spiritual lineage
13	Sired by a human and a demon
14	Transported from another reality, likely ours
15	Crawled out of a shallow grave with no memory
16	Born with an ominous birthmark, such as a religious symbol or a daemon’s sigil
17	Born under an astrological anomaly.
18	Willed into being out of someone’s dream
19	Was a monster, polymorphed into mortal form
20	Sprung out of a natural disaster, such as a fire, floor, or comet strike.

For the above, you may have to reroll on the Parentage table to determine conditions beyond the unusual circumstances or ask your Referee to work with you on the details.

Siblings

Roll d6 + SOC modifier to determine the number of siblings the player character may have lived with. To determine the character’s sibling rank, roll a die equal to or greater than the number of siblings plus one, rerolling any results greater than the total number of children.

The character has a SOC modifier of +0, so they roll a d6 and get 4. Since the total number of children is 5, the player rolls a d6 to determine where they fall in the birth order, rerolling if they get a 6.

To determine how many siblings survived until the current game, roll a d20 per sibling on the following table, adding in SOC modifier unless a natural 1 is rolled.

d20	Sibling life status
1-4	Dies in childbirth
5-6	Dies within three years of being born.
7-8	Dies within the second year after birth.
9-10	Dies within three years of being birth.
11+	Survives, hurrah!

Relationships

You will likely want to establish relationships with your parents and siblings. Using your game’s notion of Reaction Rolls works fantastic for this. In the future, I will post my rip-off take on Pendragon and BRP’s Personality Traits for running Crusader Kings-esque reactions, but in the meantime, 2d6 + CHA mod, higher is more favorable works.

GaryCon 16 – Playing Blackmoor

I was at GaryCon a few weeks ago and had an absolute blast. I got to reconvene with friends, play a decent amount of games, and chat will all sorts of people. GaryCon has consistently been one of my favorite conventions to go to.

Probably the highlight of the convention was getting to participate in a “seminar” with Bob Meyer, an old Twin Cities gamer, and the man who had inherited Blackmoor from Dave Arneson, as well as play in a game with him and a co-GM of his.

I put seminar in quotes because it was really a discussion, several people sat at a table and Bob told us stories about how gaming got to where it is today. He encouraged people to ask questions and kept the whole ordeal very warm and casual. Ben Riggs of Slaying the Dragon was there recording the seminar, and I was certainly happy because I wasn’t the only one asking “deep lore” sort of questions of Bob.

I think the biggest concept Bob conveyed was that nothing in the early days of roleplaying was birthed entirely full-formed in any one place, nor can one draw a historical precedent to any singular activity, rather that everything tends to be the sum of many influences, failed attempts, random ideas, and mechanics taken from other games.

I asked him about the Troll game he participated in – the short version of this is that Dave Arneson wanted to run Blackmoor for Bob, and Dave told Bob that he would be a “hero.” Bob then ran into a troll under a bridge, charged the troll, and after a few failed attempts to dispatch the monster, the troll clubbed Bob’s character, killing him immediately. The mythology around this event tends to state two things – that this was run utilizing the Fantasy Supplement in Chainmail, and that Bob’s disapproval of the session (which Dave agreed with) led to the inclusion of hit points (from Don’t Give Up The Ship) into Blackmoor.

Bob did seem hesitant to crown this event as “where hit points came from” in Blackmoor, and in addition – Bob listed numerous implementations of hit and damage structures that were floating around the Twin Cities, that Dave had likely been planning on playing with. Nonetheless, it was very interesting to hear him recall these events.

Bob mentioned that a big part of his continuing to run these events, despite wanting to retire numerous times, is that he has seen more and more people adopt a “Blackmoorian” style of running games. He seemed pleased when I told him there was a whole sub-niche of nerds online who are pretty obsessed with this style, and he got a bit emotional that people would travel far and wide just to hear about his friends and their games.

In terms of the actual game, I cannot go too far into specifics, as Bob did not want any details recorded, as he felt the surprise and novelty was a part of the experience of playing in his versions of Blackmoor, so I will not say what happened in the adventure. For general setup – we had two tables, one run by Bob, and a second run by a co-GM (Bob specifically liked Game Master over Referee, as he felt Referee was “rules oriented”, and Dungeon Master because he said games were more than just dungeons). Each table contained a party, and we each had the same goals – we were essentially splitting up to cover more ground. The two parties could meet up throughout play, or even affect each other.

Bob starts by asking everyone why they, the players, are there. This led to short discussions of how everyone had heard of Blackmoor. For many it was obviously Secrets of Blackmoor, for a few of us it was First Fantasy Campaign or Adventures in Fantasy and just being into the old-school stuff. After this Bob asked us all about our characters and let us pick one unique ability – this could be magical, it could be a special item or expertise, anything really. My character could talk to spirits, and other examples at our table included a shapeshifter, as well as someone who could change the density of any object.

In terms of resolution, most of it was what you’d expect if you’ve followed any details on Bob Meyer – contested 2d6, the highest roll gets their intent. My whole Primeval 2d6 is written to basically explain how I run this style. Bob made lots of calls and had a great way of finding complications to almost any action. He had a very specific way of calling for the character’s action by pointing out when a player had put forth and intention but hadn’t clarified what they wanted to do. I found that interesting, and wondered if he had run into situations of players doing gotchas of “I said I wanted to touch the glowing skull, not that I did touch it.”

It was a very fun game, and one of those experiences that I will cherish for the rest of my life. The rest of the con was fantastic as well – I got to play in many great games. I had a very fun game of Wyvern’s Roost ran by directsun that had some of the top fantasy hijinks I’ve ever been in.

If you’re ever planning on heading to GaryCon, drop me a message and maybe we can meet up and get a game in!

Play (Fantasy) Worlds idea proposal

In a previous post, I mentioned that I felt the FKR had largely done a poor job of articulating its extremely accessible playstyle and communicating how adapting to a trust-oriented framework can improve the play at tables. In this accusation, I point many a finger directly at myself, as a large portion of my blog and presence in gaming spaces has been an attempt to promote these ideas.

I decided that I wanted to change my attempts, instead of attempting to drive the discourse on Discord, forums, and Reddit, I think we could band together as a community and make a sort of “how-to” run a fantastical world for your friends, something that could be given to someone with zero experience as a suitable starting point.

I’ve chosen to propose a sort of zine, or maybe a book, or who knows the format – as I have been writing some of the content and thinking of pieces I would enjoy having others contribute to or even propose, it certainly seems to be growing in scope, but I do think some kind of a lean toolkit would be best.

Here is kind of what I am thinking of, just to get ideas rolling – we would start with an example of play, hopefully, pulled from an actual session run by me or some other hypothetical contributor, perhaps even link to a recorded AP on some platform. I think the introductory “what is roleplaying”, especially from an old-school, FKR standpoint is always lacking. I know because I’ve written quite a few and failed to get the idea across, and many other writers have similar experiences.

Afterward, we would then kind of tackle “fantasy” as a genre or “milieu” – talk about different kinds, the different elements, and why it makes for one of the best (if not, the absolute top) styles of settings for roleplaying games, of course with lots of Appendix-N styled references – hopefully with a lot of diversity of authors, formats, and styles.

With introductions and setting-setting 😛 done, we’d move into the meat and potatoes of FKR – what it means to run a referee-oriented game, and discuss how and why a referee would choose to use a particular rule, or procedure, or make a ruling. We’d go over various methods for setting situations for the players to respond to vs. a more open-ended “I’m here to challenge whatever goals you have” style. We will compare and contrast various forms of character creation, from “write three interesting things on your sheet” to coming up with a very detailed and world-specific life path for communicating the world to players initially.

Following this, the bulk of the book will be tables, tools, and toys for people to use. Lists of magic powers, adventure seeds found in folk tales, d<WHATEVER> angry peasants, all the kind of system-neutral “content” one can pull at whim in a game to get a situation going or to find out how something develops. I am thinking of having people go wild with tables and such they would find useful for running any fantasy game, inspired by all the various OSR table supplements.

So I have a decent number of words put together towards the start of this, and what I am looking for is both feedback so far, and probably proposals for material anyone wishes to contribute. This would be a volunteer-only gig, and I know that is a heavy ask, but I do not intend to make any money off of this – I intend for such a thing to be completely free, and would we ever do a print run, all proceeds would go towards some cause all of the contributors feel comfortable with.

I am very open to ideas and proposals of all kinds, but I should clear the air on what I am not looking for. For one, no games – I don’t think any particular rules text can be FKR. I’ve mentioned many times before, but FKR is not a number of rules, it’s how the table plays with the rules they decide to use. I also do not want any theory whatsoever. I have gone to school for game design and while I understand the benefits some analytical lenses can have over gaming, I think roleplaying theory is for the most part extremely terrible, and I think the over-excitement of theory heads rushing to taxonomize the FKR like a bunch of vulturous wanna-be anthropologists has really been a detriment to the community.

I think this should also be obvious, but I am not looking for anything that “challenges” or “argues” against FKR and “first-principles” high-trust play. If you’re going to write that one must play “with training wheels” before approaching this style, I view you as antagonistic to this project’s goals. If you believe that formalized rules can overcome failures in the social health of the table, you’re the audience for this kind of book, not the authority on it.

I also don’t mean to gatekeep, but I would like contributors to be people who have experience running in this style. I want this to be a play-focused project with examples from people who have succeeded in playing this way. I hate hypothetical play almost as much as I hate theory 😛

Let me know your thoughts as I continue to write. Also – how would people like to organize? I was thinking of starting up a Discord server, but I honestly feel Discord is kind of a horrible platform for actual discourse and organizing. Maybe keeping the whole process distributed is preferable. I guess if people do wanna yell at me on Discord you can jump into my own little sleepy server here: https://discord.gg/xZpeCShTR8

Let me know what you think!

State pt. 2, Purity Tests

I have received many messages regarding my post from yesterday, quite a lot of corroborating of the state of the discourse, as well as many individuals wondering if and what can be done to salvage online discussion around games of this type. I should first clarify that while the driving factor for me to make these posts was a “final straw” so to speak in one particular community, I have been having issues with several “FKR” communities for a while now, some less recent than others. This is very much not a one-point issue and is instead a reflection, almost every year, of what the supposed FKR communities have become, situated around when the various Discord servers kind of popped off. If you speak with anyone who has known me for more than a month you’ll probably know that I have pretty much voiced my concerns since day one.

I have also seen concerns that my post is calling for some type of purity testing – that I want only TRV3 FKR, and that I am rejecting beginners and people with alternative playstyles alike, accepting only the most Rigid of… Not Rigid Kriegsspiel 😛

This couldn’t be further from the case, and if anything – I think the current state of discourse actually prevents beginners from discovering what I think is the most compelling and table-empowering playstyle, and I think it disallows us from actually growing FKR by any stretch as if we allow the playstyle to be “just vibes”, then there are no constraints, limitations, or unique features to follow, manipulate, and then break.

The FKR is one of the few communities I have seen where a beginner will ask for advice for getting into FKR, and while there are a few voices that want to lend aid because many of the communities are concerned with the vibe and getting along more than the playstyle, they also get the complete opposite recommendation – immediately a wet blanket will be thrown on stressing that “FKR isn’t for everyone” and that one must play with training wheels and instead pick up Misspent Youth, or My Life With Master, or study the methods of setting position and risk in Blades in the Dark.

Instead of being about playing worlds, we start suggesting rules. In an almost contradictory fashion people will say “It’s not about the rules”, and then the community will go back and say things like “PbtA can have a mature statement on violence… D&D can only express capitalistic colonialism.” And my beef with that last sentence has nothing to do with the particular games expressed or the descriptors used – you could swap them out with literally any other game or adjective and I would still say it’s just as bunk. It’s saying that the play outcomes are dominated by the rules text selected.

How does one rectify this with the idea that referees are to hold rules texts lightly, utilizing them as tools to portray a world? How can we claim that one game “requires” emotional connection, and another “punishes” with zero context of how the table is addressing any of this? How are we to ascribe moral qualities to the players of a particular game without being a part of the table they are at?

FKR is about relationships – to rules, to the conversation, to other players, and to play. Certainly, some tools are better than others at certain tasks, but the practice of actually playing is so unique to the individual table instance that I think any attempt to exalt or vilify any particular ruleset in a way where you ascribe unalienable moral, ethical, or societal qualities is not only missing the point to the highest degree – it is actively toxic to what FKR can become.

I do not bemoan anyone who does not like FKR – we can like different things. I also do not bemoan those who have different perspectives on what it is (within reason) – we definitely should be bringing our unique perspectives to the table. What I bemoan is the sadness I feel when I see people who have spent a sizeable amount of time in a place that many first feel excited and ecstatic to explore a playstyle so rarely discussed these days, and they are instead dampened by naysayers and carelords, such that many feel dissuaded from contributing.

Purity tests be damned, but can we at least talk about FKR from a positive, actual play experience before we try to establish theoretical hypotheticals where we argue that the rules text conveys or holds some authority? More “play worlds, not rules” like we’ve been saying for years now?

The State of FKR Discourse

If it hasn’t been obvious from some of my recent vague-posting, I have been pretty unhappy with the state of so-called “FKR” discourse. The term was used to describe an alternative to play where rules texts were given authority, and where the fiction was secondary to the mechanics. Where the idea that social issues, bad behavior, and aggressive game masters and players alike could be curtailed by somehow following the rules as some designer intended.

Instead, it refocused the game as being a representation of a fictional world, communicated and adjudicated by a referee to players taking control of characters in a world. The referee is free to use whatever means they see necessary to portray and resolve this world and the actions of the player, and no rules text, designer, or other set of people were seen as an “authority” over this.

This idea was first proposed by one of the original players in Gary, Dave, and Phil’s games, and it was later adopted by further bloggers who ended up creating Discord servers and the like based around the acronym. It’s worth noting that this term was originally proposed on an OD&D forum, and the later Discord creators were posting a lot about the types of games that surrounded Arneson’s group. So traditional high-trust play.

There was a split in this community, as there often is. I certainly landed on the side I supported, but so did quite a few new people who were unfamiliar with these origins or goals, and seemed more inclined to foster a new identity around a term that had a very small, but growing amount of hype and recognizability around it. The conversation became less an exploration of the growing concept of FKR, and more a forcible reframing of what FKR was – which basically amounted to whatever the specific individual was playing.

I have mentioned before that it’s fine for things to be different – not every game, practice, or culture should fit under every label. What makes specific playstyles special is their unique approach, not that they are an umbrella. But this seems to be contrary in some FKR circles as of late. Instead, they claim that the FKR should be “just vibes”, only excluding the games that fall under a particular individual’s pet peeve. Which unfortunately is usually just old D&D or “traditional” RPGs. So we have gone in a few short years from an OD&D forum creating the term to people trying to gatekeep those that use the 3LBBs to only being able to “support” certain kinds of play.

Note here the emphasis on systems – folks are claiming that if one plays OD&D, or “trad” the particular rules text they are using dictates the play experience. If you understand anything about FKR at all, you will understand how this argument reveals the particular Edwardsian chauvinist has yet to understand the culture of play. Because instead of trying to understand it, they just attempted to hijack it.

A quote from one of the recent discords is as follows:

If there is no mechanical reason to be invested in the emotional story at large; there won’t be a real reason to be emotional attached to things in the game either.
– supposed “FKR” discord user

Of course, they’ll then try to do the “I am very smart” argument of citing the Lumpley-Care principle that by “mechanic” they really mean “anything by which you resolve the situation”, but this quote comes from a diatribe against traditional play in favor of storygames, so it’s pretty clear “mechanics” is precisely what the average person would think, not the Forgehead definition.

Now, I don’t think “FKR” as a term is “dead”, or any other such pretentious nonsense, but I think we should have more care in being stewards of this community. It is sad how this term has been circling around the RPG scene for about three years now, and supposed participants of the community still feel a need to play games “as they were intended.”

Despite all of this belly-aching on my part, I want some ideas on how we could be better stewards of this community: positively push forward the actual term, promoting healthy rpg conversation and high-trust tables.

I am thinking of trying to put together a zine or something similar, something I’m initially ~~ripping off~~ calling “Play Worlds.” The idea would be something like GURPS’s genre books, but obviously without the GURPS, and a little less dry. So we’d put together something like “Play Fantasy Worlds” that would be articles, advice, and tools that a table of any experience level could pick up, empower a referee to portray a world (of their own, their tables’, or another’s construction), and give players the best working advice for playing as characters in such a world with high degrees of player agency and the concept of tactical infinity (anything may be attempted, but not everything is as likely to succeed).

Let me know what you think, especially of the Play Worlds idea. Thank you!

Thought this was obvious

but when people talk about FKR, they’re not talking about Powered by the Apocalypse, Wanderhome, or Blades in the Dark.

When we say “play worlds, not rules – players take control of characters in the world, referees adjudicate it, rules are tools” sort of stuff, we don’t mean mechanizing theme or having play structures around delegating authority, and making appeals to the rules text and game designer as something that can mitigate social issues.

This isn’t a value judgment, despite fans of the above games who want to bandwagon onto whatever niche they can for marketing purposes. You can like Wanderhome, and like a “referee is the rules” game of OD&D–.

“OSR is dead” is nonsense gatekeeping

I think if you need any proof that the OSR is living is to see how much naysayers continually feel the need to tell you that it is in fact, dead. Now you might provide obvious examples to all their arguments – there are still new and changing ideas coming out of it, and there are more people playing the “style” (by which I mean old school games and games inspired by such, I am referring to a much larger player base than just people who quote the Principia Apocrypha) than ever.

One of the most important points about the OSR is that it was not a recreation of some mythologized past. When you play an OSR game, you are most likely not playing how they did in the 70s. Granted, the styles of play were so diverse that maybe you are playing something in the ballpark similar to one particular campaign back then, but most likely that’s not the case. And there was certainly not one particular style, probably from the point that Dave ran a game for Gary & co., and then Gary started running for his players.

This “OSR is dead” as a whatever scene is doing similar mythologizing – it’s pointing to a hyped subsection of one OSR scene as the scene. It’s usually saying either the scene you participated in, or the scene your friends talked about was the real OSR, and since current OSRs are different, they’re obviously artistically or stylistically or thematically or whateverically “dead.”

It’s straight-up saying “the past I remembered was the one true way, and anything that existed contemporaneously to that wasn’t really part of the OSR, and anything after it is dead/undead/unliving.”

Go grab three random adventures or games or supplements prior to 2019. Go jump on a blog, a forum, and a chat room at that period. Grab Assault on Blacktooth Ridge and The God that Crawls and tell me that those two are part of a single, centralized artistic movement. Try to tell me that the K&KA OSRIC folk were part of some central discussion with the GLOG kids.

One of the killer features of “the” OSR was that it was decentralized, so I don’t see how saying “well there are more people now so it’s even MORE decentralized” is any further indication that this concept is dead, if anything it’s proof that its growing.

I have yet to see any argument that the OSR is dead is anything more than “the past that I remembered has more positive qualities than the past I didn’t participate in, or the present that is different from what I remember or was told about.”

Doomed Reach Session 4

Characters

Amon Amarth, the Dwarf Cleric of Holy Law
Kalos, the recently masterless Magic-User
Maur Stern, Cleric of Holy Law
Cirrel, Elven Herald
Florby, Elven Alchemist
Brother Murray, Cleric of the Light Above
Ki-Mun, the Dwarven dandy
Torin, the sneaky axe-wielder

Downtime

Our characters begin by recounting prior adventurers and shoring up an additional hireling to account for previous losses.

Florby convinces his hireling, who owned a Saint’s head, to put the head in a pot of water for a week. They then paid a street urchin to drink some of the water and found it to have a mild numbing effect.

Brother Murray continued teaching his pigeon and goat more adventuring tricks.

Cirrel was granted an audience with Lady Mecit, a new-to-the-Reach noble looking to reclaim her uncle’s manor after he went mad. He retrieved more information on the manor and promised expedition funding should the party agree to it.

Adventure

Our group returned to the very chaotic caves, witnessing a floating geode on the way that radiated a freezing field, wilting the plants it came across.

As they climbed the peak above the caves, they witnessed that the cultists had rigged up some noise instruments attached to decapitated zombie heads in their wooden watchtower overlooking the gully, seemingly to drone noise when noticing nearby living. Torin snuck up to the tower and quickly dispatched the grotesque sentries.

Succeeded in preventing alarm, they went to the caves and saw a new trap rigged, a mechanism to shut a portcullis behind invaders, and opening one in the hallway to unleash zombies. Having been cautious, the party downed the zombies with ranged implements, but not before the foul undead could cause much noise.

Traversing to the south, they entered the circular chamber that held a vat of writhing, living gore. Florby begged that they determine if this monstrous flesh creature was sentient and evil. Amon Amarth interrogated the mass but determined its gasping and wailing to be that of a chaotic being.

Seeing bloody tracks on the ground leading out of the room and checking its direction revealed two giant spider beings wearing cloaks, medallions, and weapons. The adventurers engaged them in combat, casting light into one’s many eyes, blinding it, and dumping holy water and fire onto the flesh creature, which rose to strike the party.

After a short battle and only a few wounds, they chased the blind spider to a dead end. The cursed being told them it had recently been recruited by the cult with its brother and that only six other cultists remained, hurriedly trying to bolster their numbers. It also revealed to them a secret door to the outside, but this was not enough to save it, as the party imparted fatal justice to the creature.

They wandered the complex some more – finding the ruby skull room from the previous week reset, they also found a room full of bones and shattered skulls, and Cleric Stern was able to locate a small emerald within. They also retrieved some silver and a pendant from the pit of burned gore.

Progressing north, they found an altar room with black marble pillars depicting humans in agony and bronzed ritual implements, as well as a fine tapestry depicting the Sanguine Skull’s dominance. Continuing to delve, they ambushed four cultists in the middle of a ritual to empower a glowing red skull and smote these acolytes and the skull.

They finally stumbled upon a massive ritual room, with the undead head priest and his ghoulish assistants getting ready to call forth something from the dark. Amon Amarth stepped up and repelled the ghouls with his faith just before they could ring some hideous bell, while the rest of the party engaged the high priest and came out victorious, although slightly shaken by a fear spell.

The ghouls ran from the priest into a room full of skeletal statues similar to those in the ruby skull throne room. Deciding not to enter, they doused the room in oil and ignited the ghouls.

The party then went about stripping this floor of the dungeon bare of goods – tearing tapestries from the walls, plunging priests’ quarters for magical items, and returning to town with many artifacts to trade for silver, as well as the reward and praise from the Bishop.

Doomed Reach Session 3

Two-thirds of the party meet a grisly end.

Characters

Florby the Elven Alchemist
Wulfwig the Ponderous, Cleric of Light Above
Yarlexia the Elven Witch

Downtime

Throughout a week and a day, Florby decides to get completely blackout drunk, never having done so. They ask for Wulfwig to chaperone them, but the good cleric refuses. Yarlexia joins, and they meet a treasure seeker who found an ancient megalith about 40-50 miles to the southeast, ruled over by actual Harpies.

Wulfwig felt that the fortress did not have an adequate place for the followers of Light Above to worship, so he rented out a small plot of land near the market, and begin making plans to install a shrine.

Yarlexia continued to tell fortunes, and was graciously rewarded with a minor crystal ball by Lady Lecit, a residing noblewoman down on her luck.

Hirelings

Our group decided to interview quite a large number of hirelings, taking into service Hildo (lol name generators) the Aescetic, Carmox the cat-toting peasant, Fulco the Hobbit who worships a divine badger and seeks were-badger-dom, and Stalforth the archer who had been a slave to some inhuman monsters in the reach.

Yarlexia decided to sacrifice Hildo, who was noted as “having nothing” to summon yet another demon. She called out to a Prince of the Abyss, who was so offended by this offering he cursed her with a blunted intellect.

She resigned to resummoning Betsy, who gladly consumed the hireling.

Adventure

The adventurers made their way back to the caves, on the way encountered a small community of hobbits immigrating to the reach. Yarlexia paid them a sizeable portion of silver and pointed them towards the villages surrounding Fortress Solace, so they “blessed” the party by playing them a moving tune, and allowed each member to take a bite of their heirloom scone, baked ages ago and passed down through the generations.

They made their way back to the caves, where the fallen corpses had been stripped of flesh, but their bones remained. They made their way into the cult’s cave but found it strangely unguarded. To the south, where once lay a pit of zombies instead had a bubbling pit of gore, seemingly the flesh from the deceased turned into some unholy, roiling slurry. The group decided to not prod this, and made their way south to a large, vaulted room carved of dark stone. At the far end of the room sat a black throne whose seat held a large ruby, carved in the shape of a grinning skull – the symbol of the Sanguine Skull. All along the west and east walls stood twelve skeleton statues, painted red.

The party decided this was a trap, and thought to solve it after investigating the rest of the complex. Yarlexia instead convinced the demon Betsy to sprint in with her, grab the ruby and dash. As they made their way across the floor, a pit trap opened – Betsy falling to her apparent demise, while Yarlexia held onto the edge. The party intended to throw a rope to their Elven witch, but were shocked and surprised when the skeleton statues animated – they made their way over to Yarlexia and slew her, dumping her corpse in the pit. They also used their stone swords to knock Wulfwig to the floor, and then decapitated him. They also stabbed Solforth, who winced in pain and remained shocked as the party made a hasty retread back to the fortress.

Florby had grabbed Wulfwig’s head on the way out, and intended to place it in the cleric’s shrine. When the Elf confronted the Bishop Cadriel who had sent them on this mission, he was not pleased with the Bishop’s remote and uncaring response, cursing the priest and storming from the church.

Low Trust “Traditional”

I don’t know why I have been seeing a recent uptick in discussion on the “blorb” principles method of refereeing, but it seems like it has made its way back around Discord and the various microblog scenes as of late. This is not a style I would normally comment on – I see it very outside of what I like to play, especially when the author gave a very bad-faith hot-take on FKR.

But people have been making assertions about it that seem puzzling to me – they’re recommending it as an OSR prep style, for one, where I cannot fathom how it gets associated with the very emergent, high-trust style refereeing we strive for in various OSR communities.

blorb is extremely low trust – it’s a style that proposes a rigid hierarchy for the referee to follow, going so far as to hypothetically allow players to audit prep or a module to make sure that the referee didn’t supersede prep with emergent tools or fiat. It’s effectively the same sort of justification you see in communities that will allow for toxic play to flourish under the banner of “designer intent”, only the designer, in this case, is your prep.

The whole point of the referee in traditional roleplaying and adventure games is to utilize a source of higher fidelity rulings to step in when the mechanics or situation may produce fictionally inauthentic results. Or when they could use their experience, creativity, subject knowledge, and tools to arrive at a ruling quicker than mechanization could, often with a higher degree of specificity in that they as a human could take into context more elements than any rules text could.

Take for instance this example:

You have prepped a dungeon where a maniacal gnome has created a death trap dungeon. You placed a secret door to a treasure room off of some room – you have some reason why you selected this particular room and secret door setup.

Now let’s say in play that you realize your prior location is not suitable – maybe its in a place that would be generally inaccessible or dangerous for the gnome or its minions to reach. Maybe it does not line up with other emergent properties set forth by tools. Perhaps it doesn’t make structural sense once you examine the dungeon in play.

Now, you see a room that makes perfect sense for this. No sweat – the players have yet to find any hint of this secret door. They’re still at the entrance or fiddling with other elements – you can take a break and just shift the whole thing over to a place that will be more fictionally consistent with the dungeon, as well as the established elements of the gnome – such as it being an architectural genius.

By using your in-flight creativity and expertise around the fictional world you have course corrected a fictionally-inconsistent element into one that fits the setting and established lore. If you used blorb’s rigid adherence to prep you would be introducing fictional inconsistencies.

Having had this discussion with a few of the principles’ adherents, the argument I have received around this is pretty demeaning. It leverages the above as a critical mistake that the referee must work to improve (later… in other forms of prep, but never during the game). It plays into some impossible notion that one will never prep inconsistencies, or run a module that has mistakes in it.

All of this is hogwash, of course. What is better – to assume “perfection” (which I think is a demeaning way to phrase it and one that sorely misassumes the role of the referee), admonish “mistakes”, and force people to play a game that makes less sense in lip service to some arbitrary manifesto. Or is it better to allow for flexibility, trusting a referee to use whatever tools they have at their disposal, and to trust the players to converse, negotiate, and question elements to clarify the understanding of the world – to recognize that not everything is going to be perfect in prep or play, and to allow for the referee to follow their intended role and run the best game possible?