I just launched my zine quest kickstarter for A Blight Upon Sombreval, a dark fantasy, haunted manor style adventure for old-school and classic RPGs and their modern cousins: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cryptic-codex/a-blight-upon-sombreval.
I’d love for you to check it out, I’ve put a lot of work into this adventure over the past year or so, and have had a lot of fun running it, and hopefully other folks will as well!
Enough discussions of “immersion” and “metagaming” have sprung up recently that I wanted to write my thoughts, so I at least have a place to point to on the topic.
Continue reading Gaming is MetagamingA fun session, a lot of searching, investigation, navigation and goal setting. I especially loved how the party, when trying to hack the android personality stations, found a good compromise on something they could impart into some of the reset androids, and they did a great job convincing them that these droids needed to be “initiated” by following them.
Also the random generation of Monarch’s poetry becoming the focal point of the session was great, and I like the players doing a ton of work trying to convince this seemingly monolithic AI that they’ve destroyed thousands of pages of AI-generated poetry.
I am looking forward to session three!
A fun session. We had a bit of back and forth, and I think I was able to introduce to the players more of the folklore-ish tone of the setting. As always, the players either saw through traps ands conflicts, or were able to figure out ways to leverage the odds, which is always a fun experience for a referee, in my opinion.
Another in a quick session report, we got together, explained Mothership, talked about the themes of Gradient Descent, made characters, and got a little bit of play in.
continue readingI recently pivoted my almost-two-year OD&D open table to two different open table campaigns, this one, a sort of eldritch, dark fantasy game inspired by stuff like Averoigne, Berserk, We Are All Legends, Lovecraft, and plenty more, titled “Chronicle of the Cosmic Wound,” and a campaign of Gradient Descent. Eventually I’ll write a retrospective on the OD&D game, but for now I’ll go over Cosmic Wound’s session zero, and the hour or two we got to play before our time limit was reached.
I pitched Cosmic Wound as a dark fantasy setting I’ve been working on for some time, although “lower” magic than the OD&D game we had been playing, with a higher emphasis on stuff like Hammer Horror and some Cosmic Horror stuff. To serve this premise, as well as to hopefully address some of the open table issues I was having, I decided to turn the BRP nob on my home system WAY up, using effectively a homebrewed version of OpenQuest 3e, plus some Dark Ages Cthulhu and Mythras material in it.
My players had all voted for this game via a pitch doc where I outlined the CATS of the game – so they were at least familiar with the pitch. Here is the text of that pitch content:
continue readingThe adventure I have been playtesting quite a lot recently is ready for prelaunch on Kickstarter, while I get some of the landing page in order. If you’re interested in dark, investigative horror fantasy modules feel free to check it out.
Thank you!
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.”
Two-thirds of the party meet a grisly end.
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.
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.
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.
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?
