Playstyles for RPGs

I've been kind of meaning to talk about this for a long time, but I haven't done so. It's kind of a rebuttal or edit of a post that's now a few years old and has been tossed around quite a bit in the RPG-o-sphere. It's a good place to start, but it has some failings, or at least some of its definitions are a little wrong-headed, from my perspective, and many others also don't agree with them. So I'll post sections of it, in chunks, and then add my own perspective to have a kind of annotated experience. I have quoted and talked about some elements of this in the past, but not really proposed any critique of the entire model until now.

The topic, of course, is the various playstyle cultures within RPGs; the whole idea of "this is how you play, and this is what's important to have a good experience." I think everyone recognizes that different people want different things from the hobby, but actually codifying different playstyle cultures and their priorities was a pretty major step forward, and a significant improvement, I think, from the old GNS model, which had fallen out of favor with RPG pundits and armchair analysts and theorists. I think it still needs some work, but I admit that my approach isn't data driven, it's anecdotally driven, and based entirely on my own preferences and experiences.

The original article that I'm responding to is from 2021, and is located here. Let me go through the various playstyles that he calls out. I'm only responding to five of them. I've never heard of Nordic Larp except in association with this post, so my assumption is that it isn't really a significant style. It's either too regionally constrained to be relevant outside of the region where it's common, or it's just not a big enough deal to actually matter. If anyone's talking about it in the broader RPG sphere, I've never seen it.

Obviously, I'm heavily leaning towards my own perspective and preferences; I'm also offering how well each style aligns to me, of course. I have considerably less interest in many of these styles.

1) Classic

Classic play is oriented around the linked progressive development of challenges and PC power, with the rules existing to help keep those in rough proportion to one another and adjudicate the interactions of the two "fairly". This is explicit in the AD&D 1e DMG's advice to dungeon masters, but recurs in a number of other places, perhaps most obviously in tournament modules, especially the R-series put out by the RPGA in its first three years of operation, which emphasize periodic resets between sections of the adventure to create a "fair" experience for players as they cycle around from tournament table to tournament table playing the sections.

The focus on challenge-based play means lots of overland adventure and sprawling labyrinths and it recycles the same notation to describe towns, which are also treated as sites of challenge. At some point, PCs become powerful enough to command domains, and this opens up the scope of challenges further, by allowing mass hordes to engage in wargame-style clashes. The point of playing the game in classic play is not to tell a story (though' it's fine if you do), but rather the focus of play is coping with challenges and threats that smoothly escalate in scope and power as the PCs rise in level. The idea of longer campaigns with slow but steady progression in PC power interrupted only by the occasional death is a game play ideal for classic culture.

This comes into being sometime between 1976-1977, when Gygax shifts from his early idea that OD&D is a "non-game" into trying to stabilize the play experience. It starts with him denouncing "Dungeons and Beavers" and other deviations from his own style in the April 1976 Strategic Review, but this turns into a larger shift in TSR's publishing schedule from 1977 onwards. Specifically, they begin providing concrete play examples - sample dungeons and scenarios, including modules - and specific advice about proper play procedures and values to consumers.

This shift begins with the publication of Holmes Basic (1977) and Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth (1977), before eventually culminating in AD&D (1977-1979) and the Mentzer-written BECMI (1983-1986) line. Judges Guild, the RPGA, Dragon Magazine, and even other publishers (e.g. Mayfair Games) get on board with this and spread Classic norms around before Gygax and Mentzer leave TSR in late 1985 / early 1986. Judges Guild loses its license to print D&D material in 1985, and the RPGA's tournaments have shifted away from classic play by about 1983. Most of the other creators at TSR have shifted to "trad" (see below) by the mid-1980s, and so the institutional support for this style starts dries up, even though' people continue to run and play in "classic" games.

This is, to put it bluntly, the style that I first encountered in D&D, which means which I first encountered in RPGs overall, and the one to which I immediately started reacting against. I was immediately captivated by the obvious potential of D&D to replicate the fantasy novels I was reading and the fantasy cartoons I had watched when I was younger, but in a collaborative and improvisational way, and the whole story of clearing dungeons just for its own sake was boring. It was seeing the potential of RPGs, but failing to realize them because you're still stuck in a board game or wargame like mentality. It feels like it's not 100% embracing what RPGs can (and should, IMO) be able to provide. Beating challenges is too much like playing a game, and the whole point of RPGs is that they're more than a game; they're a collaborative, improvisational story-telling experience that uses dice and mechanics to adjudicate risk and uncertainty. What Classic offers required at the time a referee, or whatever, but classic type gameplay can be done fairly well by a computer, especially as classic got more and more "tournament" in its approach, and rules were meant to be strictly interpreted, rather than more loosely. I'm sure that there are some people who still play classic style games regularly, but I think this is a very small niche within the hobby nowadays.

As the quoted blog post will go on to say, the next style emerges coherently in the early 80s and has become dominant by the mid-80s, and probably is still dominant today, although I wouldn't necessarily swear to that. The next one is the style to which I most closely align, but clearly not the blog author, so he describes it poorly, and does so in such a way that the bad version of it is indistinguishable from the good version of it. All styles have their fatal flaws; their one element that if taken too far will lead to a bad, unsatisfying game, even for people who like the style, and he assumes that the fatal flaw is actually an integral part of the style rather than a pitfall to be avoided. Anyway, I'm clearly talking more about that style than Classic, so I should probably officially move on...

2) Trad (short for "traditional") 

Its own adherents and advocates call it "trad", but we shouldn't think of it as the oldest way of roleplaying (it is not). Trad is not what Gary and co. did (that's "classic"), but rather it is the reaction to what they were doing.

Trad holds that the primary goal of a game is to tell an emotionally satisfying narrative, and the DM is the primary creative agent in making that happen - building the world, establishing all the details of the story, playing all the antagonists, and doing so mostly in line with their personal tastes and vision. The PCs can contribute, but their contributions are secondary in value and authority to the DM's. If you ever hear people complain about (or exalt!) games that feel like going through a fantasy novel, that's trad. Trad prizes gaming that produces experiences comparable to other media, like movies, novels, television, myths, etc., and its values often encourage adapting techniques from those media.

Trad emerges in the late 1970s, with an early intellectually hub in the Dungeons and Beavers crew at Caltech, but also in Tracy and Laura Hickman's gaming circle in Utah. The defining incident for Tracy was evidently running into a vampire in a dungeon and thinking that it really needed a story to explain what it was doing down there wandering around. Hickman wrote a series of adventures in 1980 (the Night Verse series) that tried to bring in more narrative elements, but the company that was supposed to publish them went bust. So he decided to sell them to TSR instead, and they would only buy them if he came to work for them. So in 1982, he went to work at TSR and within a few years, his ideas would spread throughout the company and become its dominant vision of "roleplaying".

Trad gets its first major publication articulating its vision of play outside of TSR in Sandy Petersen's Call of Cthulhu (1981), which tells readers that the goal of play is to create an experience like a horror story, and provides specific advice (the "onion layer" model) for creating that. The values of trad crystallize as a major and distinct culture of play in D&D with the Ravenloft (1983) and Dragonlance (1984) modules written by Hickman. TSR published Ravenloft in response to Call of Cthulhu's critical and commercial success, and then won a fistful of awards and sold tons of copies themselves. 

Within a few years, the idea of "roleplaying, not roll-playing" and the importance of a Dungeon Master creating an elaborate, emotionally-satisfying narrative had taken over. I think probably the ability to import terms and ideas from other art forms probably helped a great deal as well, since understanding trad could be done by anyone who'd gone through a few humanities classes in university.

Trad is the hegemonic culture of play from at least the mid-1980s to the early 2000s, and it's still a fairly common style of play. 

First off, he kinda misses the point. Emotionally satisfying narratives are not what trad is about, although I imagine most trad players enjoy that if it's done well. But it's also the fatal flaw of bad trad GMs; and is where the whole meme of "why don't you just write a novel" comes from, as well as all of the advice against railroading. Some super-trad games advice sections of games or modules that I've seen actually think that railroading is OK as long as you're discrete enough about it that your players don't feel railroaded. While I don't completely disagree with that, the better approach is to minimize railroading at all so they don't feel railroaded. Trad games often rely quite a bit on published adventures, and that's often where the story and narrative stuff comes from; you simply can't even write a trad module without implying a story. But a well-run trad game will play pretty fast and loose with any module, because otherwise it does devolve into a railroad.

But this is where I think he's completely wrong; that's not what the trad tradition is about, it's just what it devolves into for GMs who are either lazy or poor. Story and narrative aren't the goals of the trad culture, immersion and roleplaying are. The story game guys did indeed gravitate to trad as "better than classic" at least, but if they were really into story and narrative, they probably finally found their way beyond trad to the story games or OC styles. Trad doesn't cut it for story and narrative folks, because worrying too much about story is too meta, and meta issues are anathema to trad players. How can you be immersed and roleplay effectively if you're using meta elements to affect the game? The Story Games culture has all kinds of narrative control mechanics, specifically because those are the guys who care about emotionally satisfying narratives, but most of the mechanics are meta-currencies and player-controlled meta grabbing the reins of the narrative, which feel very foreign and strange to trad players. So much so that some people claim story games aren't even RPGs at all, but are a different class of game altogether. That's ridiculous, but it's a good example of the scale of the disconnect between what this article thinks trad is about vs what it's really about.

As implied above, I think story games evolved out of trad, but the same way that trad evolved out of classic; the story games guys weren't happy with what trad was providing, so they started looking for different ways to play that gave them more of what they wanted.

In the article above, he makes reference to anyone having taken a humanities course in university having tools that he could use to craft a trad game; it's even easier than that. Anyone who's ever watched a TV show or movie, or read a book intuitively knows what a "story" feels like, and can use stuff like pacing, mood, surprise secrets and twists and other "dramatic" elements to make the trad gamer get more of what he wants from the experience. And it doesn't require that the story be pre-written; improvisational play still benefits tremendously from even simply attempting to use some of these to make the experience more immersive. 

Possibly, I'm wrong here though and the focus on immersion over narrative is a subset or splinter group of trad that's more old-fashioned in some ways, while still holding pretty true to the trad rejection of classic. If so, I guess I can call my style "paleo-trad" and consider it somewhat distinct from regular trad; perhaps a concurrent fellow traveler with read, but one who didn't quite arrive at the same place. 

3) Nordic Larp

4) Story Games

Again, an autonym. Most people who dislike them call them stuff like "Forge games" or "post-Forge indies" after the Forge indie RPG forums. "Indie RPGs" was a term for these at one point as well, but I don't think it was particularly distinctive or edifying, and evidently neither did the adherents to this culture since they mostly abandoned it. 

The Big Model is notoriously obtuse and post-Forge theory has a lot of ideas I strongly disagree with, but I think a fair characterisation of their position that doesn't use their own terminology is that the ideal play experience minimises ludonarrative dissonance. A good game has a strong consonance between the desires of the people playing it, the rules themselves, and the dynamics of the those things interacting. Together, these things allow the people to achieve their desires, whatever they may be. "Incoherence" is to be avoided as creating "zilch play" or "brain damage" as Ron Edwards once called it.

The story games crowd, to their credit, is willing to be very radical in terms of techniques towards that end - both the mechanics proper and the development of positions (story gamers often call them "Creative Agendas") like "narrativism" are meant to produce consonance and avoid dissonance on as many levels as they can picture it happening.

Story games starts with Ron Edwards in 1999, when he writes System Does Matter and sets up the Forge. By 2004 you have the Provisional Glossary and the Big Model, and one million arguments on the internet about what is or isn't "narrativist" and how much brain damage RPGs are causing, etc. The Story games forums themselves are founded in 2006 as a successor to the Forge. For the past decade, the big cluster of story game design has tended to orient itself around "Powered by the Apocalypse" games patterned after or building on Apocalypse World by Vincent Baker.

That summary is surprisingly light on actual detail of what a story game is, although it links to a lot of proto-story game navel gazing, which my version does not. The hallmarks of story game play vs trad play is that the GM is often quite minimized; the players are explicitly given a lot of control over the development of the setting, the specifics of the scenario sometimes, and how to control the narrative through the use of meta-currencies and other mechanics that differ from the non-diagetic mechanics of trad play. Early story games would be games like My Life With Master where the eponymous Master is designed collaboratively, or Dogs in the Vinyard where players can bid and spend meta-currency to make things happen, not unlike a card game like Poker or Rook. The most common ones today are the Powered By the Apocalypse games, which borrow a lot of "fiction first" mechanics from Apocalypse World. 

5) The OSR ("Old School Renaissance/Revival/Revolution") 

Yes, it's this late in this chronological listing. And yes, the OSR is not "classic" play. It's a romantic reinvention, not an unbroken chain of tradition. 

The OSR draws on the challenge-based gameplay from the proto-culture of D&D and combines it with an interest in PC agency, particularly in the form of decision-making. The goal is a game where PC decision-making, especially diegetic decision-making, is the driver of play. I think you can see this in a very pure form in the advice Chris McDowall gives out on his blog for running Into the Odd and Electric Bastionland. 

An important note I will make here is to distinguish the progressive challenge-based play of the "classic" culture from the more variable challenge-based play of the OSR. The OSR mostly doesn't care about "fairness" in the context of "game balance" (Gygax did). The variation in player agency across a series of decisions is far more interesting to most OSR players than it is to classic players.

The OSR specifically refuses the authoritative mediation of a pre-existing rules structure in order to encourage diegetic interactions using what S. John Ross would call "ephemeral resources" and "invisible rulebooks", and that the OSR calls "playing the world" and "player skill", respectively. Basically, by not being bound by the rules, you can play with a wider space of resources that contribute to framing differences in PC agency in potentially very precise and finely graded ways, and this allows you to throw a wider variety of challenges at players for them to overcome. I could write an entire post on just what random tables are meant to do, but they tie into the variance in agency and introduce surprise and unpredictability, ensuring that agency does vary over time.

I tend to date the start of the OSR from shortly after the publication of OSRIC (2006), which blew open the ability to use the OGL to republish the mechanics of old, pre-3.x D&D. With this new option, you had people who mainly wanted to revive AD&D 1e as a living game, and people who wanted to use old rule-sets as a springboard for their own creations. 2007 brought Labyrinth Lord, and the avalanche followed thereafter. The early OSR had Grognardia to provide it with a reconstructed vision of the past to position itself as the inheritors of, it had distinct intellectual developments like "Melan diagrams" of dungeons and Chris Kutalik's pointcrawls, and I would say it spent the time between 2006 and roughly 2012 forming its norms into a relatively self-consistent body of ideas about proper play.

I've talked a lot about the OSR before, and the divisions within it. I'm familiar enough with the OSR to know that it's not entirely monolithic in terms of what it wants to accomplish, but to be fair, that's probably true for the other playstyles too. The OSR started with just being about bringing old versions of the game back into print, sorta, through the retroclones. This evolved quickly into publishing new modules that were compatible with these rules; but these new modules didn't necessarily imply any specific playstyle; they were about the system being used, not the culture of play.

As he says, though... philosophical maunderings from places like Grognardia, followed by Matt Finch's OSR primer and other documents, like Questing Beast (and others) comments in Principia Apocrypha did eventually lead to the OSR becoming a coherent play style, that was a reaction in some ways against the dominance of the trad style, by attempting to re-contextualize some ideas from Classic play and put them into a new framework where they made sense for more modern gamers who weren't going to tournaments and playing tournament style modules. Not unexpectedly, this started to drift even more as people projected what they thought was fun or what they wanted to do, although curiously the OSR, or at least many of its online proselytizers, frequently tried to assume some kind of moral superiority by attempting to tie their playstyle to some original tradition, even though it wasn't a recreation of an old tradition at all. The OSR playstyle was retro, no doubt, but it wasn't original, and nothing quite like the OSR culture of play existed back in the day. It's a very reactionary play style that bears some resemblance to the classic style, but isn't really the same thing either.

And an interesting development within the OSR is the attempt to take the OSR playstyle manifestos of sorts and apply story games mechanics to them in many respects. Much of this is happening in the so-called NSR, or Nu-School Revolution. Whether or not that subset of the OSR completely jumps into becoming a subset of story games, or it's own thing that's a hybrid of the two; or if it just fades away, mostly, without making a long-term splash, remains to be seen.

6) OC / Neo-trad

This is the only one of the terms that isn't fully an autonym, though' "OC" can be appended to a "looking for game" post online to recruit people from this culture consistently, so it's closer. I also call it "neo-trad", firstly because the OC RPG culture shares a lot of the same norms as trad, secondly because I think people who belong to this culture believe they are part of trad. You also see this style sometimes called "the modern style" when being contrasted to the OSR. Here's an example of someone who calls it "neo-trad" elaborating a very pure vision of the style (though' I disagree with the list of games provided as examples of neo-trad at the end of the article). On Reddit, "OC" is often called "modern" as in "the modern way to play" or "modern games".

OC basically agrees with trad that the goal of the game is to tell a story, but it deprioritizes the authority of the DM as the creator of that story and elevates the players' roles as contributors and creators. The DM becomes a curator and facilitator who primarily works with material derived from other sources - publishers and players, in practice. OC culture has a different sense of what a "story" is, one that focuses on player aspirations and interests and their realization as the best way to produce "fun" for the players.

This focus on realizing player aspirations is what allows both the Wizard 20 casting Meteor Swarm to annihilate a foe and the people who are using D&D 5e to play out running their own restaurant to be part of a shared culture of play. This culture is sometimes pejoratively called the "Tyranny of Fun" (a term coined in the OSR) because of its focus on relatively rapid gratification compared to other styles.

The term "OC" means "original character" and comes from online freeform fandom roleplaying that was popular on Livejournal and similar platforms back in the early 2000s. "OC" is when you bring an original character into a roleplaying game set in the Harry Potter universe, rather than playing as Harold the Cop himself. Despite being "freeform" (meaning no die rolls and no Dungeon Master) these games often had extensive rulesets around the kinds of statements one could introduce to play, with players appealing to the ruleset itself against one another to settle disputes. For the younger generations of roleplayers, these kinds of games were often their introduction to the hobby. 

I think OC RPG emerges during the 3.x era (2000-2008), probably with the growth of Living Greyhawk Core Adventures and the apparatus of "organized play" and online play with strangers more generally. Organized play ended up diminishing the power of the DM to shift authority onto rules texts, publishers, administrators, and really, to players. Since DMs may change from adventure to adventure but player characters endure, they become more important, with standard rules texts providing compatibility between game. DM discretion and invention become things that interfere with this inter-compatibility, and thus depreciated. This is where the emphases on "RAW" and using only official material (but also the idea that if it's published it must be available at the table) come from - it undermines DM power and places that power in the hands of the PCs.

These norms were reinforced and spread by "character optimization" forums that relied solely on text and rhetorically deprecated "DM fiat", and by official character builders in D&D and other games. Modules, which importantly limit the DM's discretion to provide a consistent set of conditions for players, are another important textual support for this style. OC styles are also particularly popular with online streaming games like Critical Role since when done well they produce games that are fairly easy to watch as television shows. The characters in the stream become aspirational figures that a fanbase develops para-social relationships with and cheers on as they realize their "arcs".

Well, he's wrong in suggesting that it shares norms with trad, because he misses the point of what trad is and thinks the focus on story unites them. The char-op design and focus on "RAW" is something more in common with Classic play, which trad players disparage and may even feel intense contempt for, although I'll agree that the end result of a "neo-trad" game looks little like a classic style game. It also looks little like a trad game, however, and I'd venture that most trad GMs would quickly tire of attempting to run for a neo-trad player, who comes across to a dyed in the wool trad guy like me as indulgent and self-absorbed. That said, I have no doubt that OC developed out of trad, from people who were playing trad and found that it didn't give them the "my precious character" syndrome that they desired, so gradually OC developed as an alternative to, or even reaction against, trad games.

Another interesting correlation that I'm not sure many people have made yet is the slew of articles a few years ago about DM shortages in 5e in particular and online. Part of that is the rise of the OC style amongst younger Millennial and Zoomer gamers playing online, who tend to be the largest cohort of OC players. GMing for an OC game can't be a very rewarding or fun experience, I'd imagine. Certainly, I'd hate it, and tell OC players to take a hike after trying to wrangle them into a more trad paradigm. I'm 100% convinced that OC can't last, because it's guaranteed to be crappy to GM for. Maybe OC will make it as the style that can actually stomach a crappy AI DM, and that'll be its avenue for survival and growth. But among people actually playing real, regular games, especially in person, I can't imagine that either GMs or other players can stomach an OC player for very long without getting seriously burned out with his bratty princess syndrome. 

Clearly my opinion of the OC style isn't super high. I can understand why it appeals to some gamers. I just can't understand why anyone else would want to accommodate those players and their playstyle for long, making OC a self-defeating playstyle.

Cult of Undeath: Front #2: The Shadow Over Eltdown

Here's my original summary for this front.. It's a nice place to start.

The swamp snake cult, centered around the blinded medusa who instead of petrifying her victims, she hypnotizes them and gradually starts turning them into snake cultists. She's not truly blind, because all of the snakes have eyes too, but you get my drift. Heavily based on Cult of the Reptile God combined with some of the early Age of Worms adventures and Lovecraft's story The Shadow Over Innsmouth except with lizards and snakes in a swamp instead of fish on the coast.

Eltdown is a place on my map that stands at the gap between the Knifetop Mountains in the south and the Sabertooth Mountains in the north. While this is "on paper" the border region between the Hill Country and Timischburg, the reality is that neither nation controls, nor even has much interest in the region of Eltdown. It would seem that Eltdown would be a regular trade route between the two, but for a variety of reasons, it's actually not. Rather, there's more traffic up the river through Timischburg to Mittermarkt, and from there across well-traveled overland routes, over some relatively gentle low passes in the southern Sabertooths, skirting around the southern edge of the Haunted Forest and from thence to Barrowmere. This is a change from what I've previously published, where I implied or even stated in vague terms that the Fenroad was the only reliable route; I now consider the Fenroad to be an alternate with an evil reputation; in fact, the Fenroad has fallen in many cases to disuse and disrepair because of the opening of safer routes over lower passes. Eltdown has, therefore become a bit more of a backwater than it already was. There is still some traffic between Barrowmere and the hamlets and towns of southeastern Timischburg on the Fenroad, and some even travel between Barrowmere and Mittermarkt on the Fenroad, but not much. It is—in theory—faster than going over the mountain passes, even if the passes are relatively easy, and certainly in the dead of winter when the passes might be snowed in, the Fenroad is the only good choice, but the Fenroad is known to be dangerous and undesireable. Eltdown itself has a reputation as a grim backwater best avoided, and the Fenshave a fell notoriety, and the quality of the road is poor, which could negate whatever benefit there is for crossing the lower road instead of the passes—even in the winter.

The Fens themselves are, of course, soggy and reeking of decay as rotten grasses and sedges gradually turn into peat. Heavy brush, matted grasses, bushes and low-growing or choked out trees are also common, and the Eltdown Fens are infamous for being almost constantly socked in with persistent thick fog. Sullen and unfriendly swampies, of uncertain ethnic origin live in small hamlets along the Fenroad, and even maintain a few stops for travelers, and they have more farmers, hunters, and swampie relatives who live a bit further from the road, but nobody human goes very deep into the fens, and what exactly is lurking in the center is the subject of garbled rumor and legend. 

Of course, column #1: The Murder of Alpon von Lechfeld, has its finale in the fens themselves; that's where Otto von Szell and Loriana Stefanescu are hiding out, because they're trying to awaken Bokrug. That's part of what lurks in the center of the swamps; the half-buried city that was destroyed by Bokrug aeons ago, and where he still lingers in torpor or hibernation, or death or whatever exactly his status is. But there's more to the fens than just this, and this column highlights more of the dangers of the Fens. Clever or enterprising PCs could even, potentially, get this "cult of the reptile god" and the cultists of von Szell to cross paths; they're not likely to be amicable or happy with each other's agendas, although the PCs would have to put some real effort into actually getting to the "let's you and him fight" solution to dealing with either of them. They do have enough discipline to not jeopardize their agendas fighting another unrelated cult that happens to share geography. But it remains a potential idea for enterprising PCs to even the odds against both cults from both columns (and I still have one more column that will touch on the Fens too; more possibilities!)

Eltdown itself is a pretty sinister place, and many of the people who live there are part of a cult called the Learned Children of Heqet. Heqet is the blind medusa, who in spite of the fact that (because she's been blinded in her main eyes) she can't turn anyone to stone, she can dominate them instead and the dominated gradually start to take on snake traits as the domination fades, so that they become willing cultists. The snakemen also mate with some of the people of Eltdown, and as in Innsmouth of the Lovecraft story, they will eventually, as adults, turn into snakemen, although they first spend time as human-looking, albeit sometimes with funny features. Passers-by attribute these funny-looking features to the ethnically mysterious background of the Eltdowners combined with inbreeding that sometimes happens in small, backwoods places, so the truth is not suspected. In any case, these cultists don't really like strangers much, and most of the rumors about the Fenroad actually are attributable to Eltdown. The PCs might be accosted to be kidnapped and taken before Heqet on the road into or out of Eltdown, or if they look like trouble-makers, they might be accosted at night in their lodgings in town. (I'd give them a chance to escape before being taken to Heqet; that's more of a finale after they've been working the reptile cult for some time.)

Secondly, the PCs might well discover others who have been kidnapped by the snake cult (cult of the reptile god!) Some of them are beyond saving; they've either been too converted into snake people themselves to be saveable, or they've been blinded as part of a sacrificial ritual (makes sense for a blind medusa) and temporarily enslaved until they can be killed. Many of these are in town, and I anticipate that there's a lot of work to do to clean up the town, or at least save some of the people in town who aren't already cultists.

Thirdly, some of the smaller villages might be under attack by cultists too, or people have been kidnapped in large numbers, etc. A small swampie village celled Rael Kernal could face an all out assault, if you want to just have a good, tense combat. If you want the whole thing to be more sinister than an all out assault, on the other hand, you could have snakes or burrowing snake-men attacking more surreptitiously. Depends on how you need the game to play out at this juncture if you're running it; is a more straightforward defense of a village what you need, or a desperate attempt to root out hidden enemies that you can't see coming? Alien vs Aliens, so to speak.

Fourth, and this is the last one of what is a slightly abbreviated column; only four entries instead of five, the PCs would presumably root out the cult by entering the fens, finding Heqet's temple or lair, and killing her. Maybe they do something else with her, but I'm going to assume that by far the most likely result is that's how they handle it. Especially if they've had NPCs that they liked who were blinded or killed, or if they were themselves captured at some point. Most PCs I've known are motivated at least as much by revenge as by anything else. 

Maybe there can be a fifth element as an epilogue too; what to do with the cultists? Most of them are irredeemable, many of the captives are maimed; but some of the snake cultists, because of the domination effect of Heqet, are victims rather than monsters. Of course, the PCs might say; "we beat the bad guy; the clean-up is on you now." And they might even have good reasons for doing so, because the rest of the campaign 5x5 of Cult of Undeath isn't sitting around waiting for them to set up the Eltdown Charity or whatever. But I'll leave open the idea that Eltdown has been decimated, and if it's even possible to recover is not clear, without some help or intervention from someone. 

I actually kind of like the idea that if the PCs decide that they can't help Eltdown and move on that some other group of NPCs, maybe even my thoroughly despicable anti-PC group, comes in after them, sets something up, and even claims credit for liberating the town. Maybe it will eventually come out that these anti-PCs were allied with Heqet's cult all along. I did mention that they're the worst, right? Terrible, terrible people. I don't actually intend to set them up as an enemy to be confronted in this 5x5, but I still like the idea. When they show up in some other 5x5, if that's what happens, the PCs will automatically hate them.

But Not Tonight

Going over some of my tracks; remixes and cover versions, in particular. For whatever reason, I think I may have had more cover versions of "But Not Tonight" than any other Depeche Mode track. I certainly had at least twice as many as I do for "Never Let Me Down Again" even though the later is one of DM's signature tracks. For "Enjoy the Silence" I actually have relatively few cover versions, but tons of remixes, many of them bootleg remixes.  I'm not quite sure what to make of that, or if that's not really enough data that I should try to make anything of it. But I'll take a stab at it anyway, because nothing has ever stopped me from venturing my opinion on things, even if I also freely admit that it's a just so story. I think "But Not Tonight" is actually one of DM's best tracks, and I think it's actually one of their most popular tracks, and one that people really like in spite of the fact that the band itself doesn't seem to.

The band kind of dumped on Sire Records, the American partner of Mute, who released "But Not Tonight" as a single because they got it on the soundtrack of a "dodgy" movie (which, admittedly, seems to have been somewhat of a flop) and the failure of the single was part of what convinced DM to write off the possibility of major success in America. At least for a year or so; when they did the Masses Tour they realized somehow that they were actually huge, especially after the risky Rose Bowl show was a gigantic smash.

But they also didn't like that "But Not Tonight" was released, and they've rarely played it. Alan famously wrote it off, saying that they spent nine days remixing "Stripped" and whipped off "But Not Tonight" in just a couple of hours or something. So what? How much time you spend working on a song isn't necessarily indicative of how good it is. Now, granted, "Stripped" is also a great song, and one of DM's most iconic too. But if DM had actually embraced "But Not Tonight" it could be too. It's clearly well-loved. It's clearly frequently covered. I do see, however, fewer bootleg mixes of it, for whatever reason, but not none. (Dominatrix and Kaiser, for example, both pop up. But they've remixed almost everything DM.)

As an aside, although I don't think this song was the first place I encountered the word "debauchery", of course, it's certainly the song that made it a word that I was very familiar with. I love to use the word debauchery and debauch, all thanks to you, "But Not Tonight!"

Of the cover versions, many are more or less similar to the original, except with a stronger Scandinavian accent, or something like that. I think the best ones are Æon Rings, which is a little different, but still excellent, and I also like Fotonovela and Jimmy Somerville's versions for being significantly different. Scott Weiland, late lead singer of Stone Temple Pilots did an absolutely killer version; very delicate and fragile. Really highlights the lyrics and their theme. A version by New Life Generation is probably the best of the "faithful" covers, by which I mean that it changes very little, but just enough to be at least as interesting as a good remix. 

Depeche Mode... over

I don't mean that the band is over. what's left of them may churn out another album or two still. They're getting pretty old, but they're not dead, and who knows if they still feel the need to produce more songs, tour again, and grab more of what they can with their grabbing hands. They might well. I suspect that I'm done seeing them live, however. I really wish I'd seen them on the Masses Tour or even the Violator tour, but I didn't. I saw the Playing the Angel tour and the most recent Memento Mori tour. They were noticeably lower energy in the almost twenty years between those two tours, and their back catalog is getting more full of stuff that I have less interest in. 

I put all of their albums, and by albums I mean my "deluxe album" selections which includes b-sides and non-album singles from the same era (like "Shake the Disease" or "Martyr", etc.) and played their entire catalog, minus remixes, back to back to back. It took me the better part of two or three weeks to get through it all during my commutes back and forth to work, but to be fair, I was kind of sick last week and worked from home most of the week too. Still, it was a pretty big undertaking in terms of just listening to music. I committed to playing hundreds of tracks before I would make any changes in my play queue. I finished it late Saturday night, and was able to listen to something else, finally, on the way to church on Sunday. One of the things that I anticipated, of course, is that Depeche Mode "peaked" in 1987 with Music for the Masses, so I knew that the quality of the listen-through would be front-loaded. But I wanted to see what I thought of some of the later material after not really listening to it very recently or very much, and I did always think that their most recent album, Memento Mori was their best one since Playing the Angel at least, if not even further back.

I was a little surprised to find that I've concluded that I'm kind of over Depeche Mode. Maybe I finally grew up. Maybe I've just changed too much and they haven't, or that they've changed in ways that I can't follow. The older stuff I still enjoyed, but I wasn't as excited to go through all of those tracks as I expected to be. I feel like I'd rarely ever feel like listening to a whole album all the way through anymore; I'm at the point where I'm OK just cherry-picking tracks that I want to hear, and that's that. I certainly won't want to do their entire catalog like that, even if I do pick up an album or two here and there. The later albums weren't as bad as my memory made me fear them to be, but they were pretty forgettable, with the exception of a few stand-out tracks. Even Exciter wasn't that bad, and overall I mostly enjoyed it, but not enough that I'd be excited to do it again. No pun intended.

Spirit, which was already the worst, was even worse. It didn't sound terrible, but Martin Gore writing about political themes in 2017, where he's trying to chastise people for voting for Brexit and Donald Trump, was bad when it was released, and sounds absolutely cringy, out of touch and embarrassing today. At least in 2017, he was echoing a strong Establishment narrative about reality; today, that narrative has collapsed completely, and Martin Gore's political sensibilities sound like those of an arrogant, entitled thirteen year old. (Of course, as part of the resistance, such as it was, to that Establishment, I found that Martin Gore's anthems of Establishment narrative, ironically pretending like he was part of the resistance, was cringy, off-putting and made me angry right away. But now, it's to laugh at rather than be angry at. But it still doesn't make anything on that album sound any better; if anything, it sounds stupid beyond all reason after even just a few weeks of Trump in office, and similar movements all over the countries of Western civilization.)

Mostly what I discovered is that I'm kinda over Depeche Mode. I still like them. I still like a lot of their classic era tracks, from the middle to late 80s and even the early 90s. I even still like some of their stuff since then, although not as much. But to some degree, I identified as a Depeche Mode fan in terms of my musical taste, and well... I guess I no longer do, and this exercise made that clear. Depeche Mode are a couple of cranky old farts who never really grew up, and that's increasingly clear. I identified with them as a teenager, because they were geared towards speaking to issues that a teenager faces. It was the ultimate somewhat alienated teen anthem to listen to Depeche Mode for Gen-Xers. Even when it no longer applied to me because I wasn't an alienated teenager anymore, I could at least still empathize and understand that perspective. Now, however, it's starting to feel cringy and "stuck" in a paradigm and perspective that simply isn't appropriate for someone my age, much less someone their age; they're a good ten years older than me. 

I'm not sure if I feel sad to feel "over" Depeche Mode, or if it's just the acceptance of something that clearly already happened, and it just feels natural. What do I listen to instead?

Well, first off, I'm finding that I identify less with my taste in music than I did when I was younger. I still like music, and I still identify more generally with the 80s, as a consummate Gen-Xer. But I listen to music not to express my identity as much, but just to have something cool going on in the background while I'm doing other things. I like a lot of the 00s hard trance, early hardstyle and otherwise harder dance styles of EDM still, but I don't identify with that music, I just like it. I listen to a lot of synthwave, but again, that's not musically interesting enough to really hold my interest; I just like it as backing soundtracks to what's otherwise going on. Trying to listen to it to appreciate it for its musicality doesn't really work. I also like a lot of para-ambient stuff that evokes a mood for reading or for RPGs; the unofficial YouTube soundtracks of Cthulhu or D&D stuff. But again, musically it's not usually interesting enough to hold my interest for its own sake. 

I'm also finding that my appreciation for classical music has come to the foreground once again. I've always loved classical music, but I don't always listen to a lot of it day to day. Lately, I've found myself drawn to it more and more. And, of course, musically classical music offers quite a bit more than any kind of popular music anyway. I may yet find myself primarily a classical music fan before I die. Orchestral movie soundtracks, at their best, offer a portion of what classical offers, but again; musically it usually isn't as rich.

Unlike the Boomers, while I'll always like the pop music of my generation, I'm unlikely to try and make the narcissistic case that it's some kind of pop music gold standard, better than anything before or since. I identify with it because of my age cohort, and I don't expect any other age cohort to think my generation's pop music is the best. The Boomers never got that, and still try and tell us that the Beatles or Bob Dylan are the bestest music ever, which makes people of my generation and younger just push back even harder the more we hear that kind of nonsense. And if there's anything that generations younger than the boomers have learned, it's to to not be like the boomers.

EDIT: Although I wonder; probably a big part of the problem was trying to do the entire catalog all at once. If I did an album here and album there, and maybe even put it on repeat and listened to it two or three times before finishing, kinda like how I did when I was younger, the experience would probably have been significantly less tedious. 

In any case, I started doing some remix and cover version collections of my favorite tracks, starting with "Never Let Me Down Again", and I queued up all the versions of "But Not Tonight" that I have after that. Assuming I'm still in the mood after I near the end of that queue, I'll add "Enjoy the Silence" and "If You Want" and a few others after that. 

Orcs & Goblins: Hero Forge

After making my Hero Forge video of orclings, I decided that a few of the models didn't look super great. Actually quite a few of them. I made just minor updates; mostly coloring and lighting. If I do more, I might customize the faces a bit. 

Although I kind of like the idea that to humans, i.e., us, all goblins look alike. This is probably just the first batch of more updates to come.

YouTube and channels

I've been doing a lot more with my YouTube channel, darkfantasygamerx, than with this blog. Which is OK. I enjoy doing YouTube. It's a new expression of my hobby. I do it for myself. This is good. I can't do it as a living, certainly, or even as a side-gig. I simply couldn't enjoy it if I were chasing views and click-through.

I do notice one interesting thing, however. I post videos under the DarkFantasyGamerX channel, because that's what it's most for, but for a variety of unimportant reasons, I mostly browse YouTube from a different channel, that I created for something that I don't use anymore. All of my watch history, my comments, etc. are on that channel instead, so I don't really even log on to DarkFantsyGamerX on Youtube itself, although it's my default on the YouTube Studio app, where I upload my new videos. One side effect of this is that it's simply too inconvenient for me to care to interact with commenters, of which I'm starting to occasionally get a few. However, this is probably good. Most of the comments are really, really dumb. They either say something that's a complete non sequitur, or shows that they literally didn't understand or even watch the video. And then I have guys who complain about the video or audio. Probably well-meaning, or at least reasonably so, but I don't care. So I have nothing to say to these people anyway. (I did go out of my way to correct they guy who thought he was correcting me on black people being soccer hooligans or speaking with a Cockney accent, because WTF dude. That was probably a mistake.)

People are the worst. I don't like people. Most people are kind of stupid, or narcissistic. Comments sections on YouTube are the worst. There's little to be gained from interacting with people.

My orcs controversy is my most popular one right now. That's not surprising. It was a topical topic, and that's part of the reason I recorded the video. I've done two others since then that have had much smaller impact. Back to normal.

Heresiarchs

In the DFX game, there can be many potential supervillains. I have monster stats for Cthulhu, fer cryin' out loud. Vampires and liches are classic supervillains in a fantasy sense. So are some of the powerful daemons. But Heresiarchs are explicitly envisioned as fantasy supervillains. I specifically, actually, envisioned them as the Ten Who Were Taken. If you've never read the ten (or maybe it's eleven now; I think he may have added a recent book) Black Company books by Glen Cook, you should. They not only foreshadow the rise of grimdark, without being explicitly as nihilistic and derpy as grimdark itself often is, but they're just quite clever and interesting. The main narrator, Croaker, is one of the most unique voices in fantasy fiction. The Heresiarchs are deliberately meant to be a "body" of individuals that are similar to the Ten Who Were Taken. Like them, they have many of the aspects of a lich, but without necessarily their weaknesses. Many of them have enough vanity to perpetuate a beautiful, charismatic appearance, while others simply don't care that they look like walking corpses, such as the Hanged Man or the Limper from the Ten. They are undead, or at least undying, and have many of the strengths of both vampires and liches, but few of either of their weaknesses.

I've come up with fifteen unique Heresiarchs. Few know of them in the setting, and much of what is known about them is garbled by deliberate lies, or has passed into dubious legend. There's also a Heresiarch monster stat block in the monster section of my game. In reality, each of these should use the Heresiarch stat block as a starting point and then add at least a couple of additional abilities and other minor changes, so that they're all a little unique. But this post isn't for that. I don't really imagine that my PCs would ever be likely to be sitting around fighting Heresiarchs in a straight up fight anyway. They're more like behind the scenes Fu Manchu or Moriarty manipulators. Stats are just there for reference in their cases.

Anyway, this is just a summary of the Heresiarchs I've identified and named so far (which may end up being all of them, of course) and I'll probably use this blog post as a starting point for a YouTube video that I've been planning on making for some time.

Amrruk the Ancient

In frightened and blasphemous whispers, there is a rumor that before the First Man, there was another race of men. One that had fallen so far that God wiped them all out, without even leaving the equivalent of Noah to replenish the Earth. He then started completely over with the current race of men. But Amrruk, against all odds, is a survival from this strange, alien race of men before men; who endured by turning himself into a creature of slime and protoplasm. Underneath the slime, his original skeleton still survives, given life by his ancient, cursed will. But he spends most of his time in torpor, usually unconcerned with the affairs of this "new" race of Men, lingering in blighted swamps, now having more in common with other creatures of slime and mud than anything else.

Arzana, Clad in Black

Taking the form of a young feral girl, running wildly through the waste places of the world unharmed by any vagary of climate or weather, Arzana is one of the most fiercely anti-social of the heresiarchs and rarely interacts with any of them either as enemy or ally. Nobody knows for sure what her agenda is, but she seems to delight in perverting and corrupting the natural world. Some believe that the environmental catastrophe that befell Hyperborea was caused by her, although manipulated by Jairan Neferirkare, as punishment on the grislings for rejecting her cult. Arzana frequently runs clad only a few rags and smeared with dirt and mud through the cold, wild wilderness, screaming her fury and casting powerful bolts of lightning from her hands and from the sky to blight and destroy the landscape about her. It is also believed that wendigos and other strange cannibal spirits of the cold and inhospitable wilderness are either her creation, or somehow a reflection of her malevolent will.

Bartolomeo the Many-angled

Based on his name, he may have originally been from the Corsair Coast, or perhaps he spent some time there and adapted a local name, but nobody really knows from whence Bartolomeo really came. His explorations and perambulations of worlds beyond our own have warped and destroyed much of his body, which he was replaced with forged and crafted replacements, powered by his sorcery. Although rumors also abound that it's less about his exploration of the Void and as much about past feuds with other heresiarchs that caused this physical damage to him. Bartolomeo is another one of the heresiarchs who's private pursuits into other matters thankfully brings him into conflict with mankind infrequently, and he can go many decades, or even centuries, without passing under the familiar skies of the world of Man.

Bernat Haspar de Ruze

The Ghost Pirate of the Kell Sea, Bernat Haspar de Ruze is a "young" heresiarch, and therefore one that the rest of the club looks with a wary eye. He has, however, been cursed to be tied to his ship so far. Although he's working diligently to remove that particular aspect of his heresiarch curse, and he is secretly closer than many think, it has spared him attention from his evil peers, who see his captive state and believe that that neutralizes him as a player in their occasionally catastrophic power plays and strategic moves against each other. Once de Ruze finds himself freed of his ship, however, he will immediately be seen as either a potential ally, pawn or threat by the rest of the Heresiarchs, not to mention any number of other liches, daemons or vampires, or other evil sorcerers who covet his power and forbidden knowledge. In the meantime, he and his dread ship, The Flying Longshoreman, search the territory off the coasts of Timischburg, the Corsair Coast and Nizrekh, searching for clues for his reprieve from the curse that holds him captive, and woe betide any other ship that crosses his foul path while doing so.

Dommik Sébastien, He of the Beast Aspect

When the Charnel God Tarush fell from the sky in the territory that later became Grozavest, capital of Timischburg, long before the arrival of the Timischers, seven knights of old Kinzassál went to confront the horror that fell from the sky. They were able to seal up Tarush under the Great Chains, but in the process became sealed with him in his sorcerous prison. Perverted and warped by his dark necrotic power while exposed to him, they became the Primeval vampires, the fathers of the entire cursed race. Dommik Sébastien is one such, who has somehow managed to escape the sealing, at least at times, although it is not clear that his freedom is complete and total. Bearing the most overtly vampiric appearance of all heresiarchs because of his origin as such, his primary goal seems to be the release of Tarush and the other Primevals from their prison, but it is no secret amongst the other heresiarchs that he's quite mad. Even by their standards.

Esmeraude, She Who Ushers the Apocalypse

A beautiful and serene woman of the far north, associated with the earliest of the Elementalists, Esmeraude, in spite of her Terassan name, has been living near and around the surturs since nearly the inception of that race. Some believe that she actually caused the magical rift that turned some of the early primitive humans into the elementalists in the first place, by causing magical leaks that changed the genetic matrix of the people living there. She allegedly lives inside an active volcano with a persistent lava lake. Her serenity can be rather easily undone, however, and her fiery temper when roused is a major part of the legend of her for any who know of the heresiarchy at all. Prophecies exist that claim she will be a significant component of the final destruction of the earth, when its time comes, and that she and her fiery elemental daemons will purge the entire earth of life in an orgy of fire and flame. In the meantime, she is content to slowly yet inexorably marshal her forces in the wilderness beyond the earth, beyond even the City of Brass, so her appearances here are rare and greatly to be feared.

Hutran Kutir, the Hex-king

Another "young" heresiarch, Hutran Kutir is the semi-legendary "first kemling", the father of the entire race, and the founder of the nation of Baal Hamazi. He was killed many centuries ago, and his heirs ruled his kingdom until relatively recently, when the nation of Baal Hamazi fell apart into squabbling city-states and tribes. However, garbled rumors of his return from the dead have spread from deep within Baal Hamazi. These rumors do not paint an optimistic picture of his attitude at the failure of his nation, and the the rumored marshalling of dark forces in the north to retake and reforge it by force are starting to seep outwards. Some, even, of the other heresiarchs have taken note.

Jairan Neferirkare, the Soulless

This darkly beautiful and yet inhuman and completely soulless evil queen once ruled as the undisputed goddess of old Hyperborea. Her yoke, however, was heavy, and rebellion was a constant threat, especially as the early humans who lived there learned enough sorcery to collectively threaten her. She abandoned her aim to rule a kingdom on earth in Hyperborea, and fled to the Shadow Realm, a dark and twisted reflection of the world of Men that suited her temperament well. However, she did not do so without a parting shot of spite and hatred, cursing the men of Hyperborea to become the grisling race, subject to the cannibal curse, and Hyperborea was ruined, forever becoming a frozen wasteland. Although only marginally able to support the life of a greatly reduced population of grislings, even those were then threatened by the invading Inutos, and those that survived fled the area, mostly for good.

Kadashman, He Who Peers Into the Void

Among the most disquieting and least human of the heresiarchs, Kadashman, like Bartolomeo, appears to be more concerned with the Voids beyond the world than with gathering power or influence here. Often accompanied by servitors that will shred the sanity at a glance of any normal person, Kadashman is thankfully infrequently involved in anything in the world of mankind. Nobody is entirely clear if he is a rival or ally of Bartolomeo, but there are at least some rumors that the inhuman appearance and aspect of the two are the results less of their explorations of the Void and more of their hostile encounters with each other. But other rumors suggest that they do at times work together. Kadashman is one of the most mysterious of the heresiarchs, and some claim that not only is he no longer human, but that possibly he never was to begin with.

Kefte Taran, Mistress of Forgotten Secrets

An exotically beautiful young woman, at least to appearances, this vile necromancer has an unnatural affinity for—and some say, perverse attraction to—the dead.  Her association with the long dead and restless spirits has, however, granted her access to a wealth of knowledge that her colleagues can only dream about. Kefte Taran frequently spends time in haunted locations, where the line between the mortal world and the world of shadows is thin, surrounded by the restless spirits of the most evil and depraved of the dead. She stirs so infrequently from these haunts, that some have even supposed that perhaps she is trapped in a haunted palace, much like the Ghost Pirate is trapped on his ship.

Master of Vermin

Although he's often considered—by those few who know of him—as unconcerned with mortal affairs and either above (or beneath) them, this is a dangerous affectation to hold.  A common conceit of many of the heresiarchs is that they are the true "gods" of this earth, and deserve to be worshipped as such. Master of Vermin, who's name is unknown, possibly even to him, certainly believes this, and perhaps more than any other of the heresiarchs, has taken action to ensure that when that time comes, he's ready to step directly into that role. This is not good news for humanity, since the vermin lord has no use for them.  Master of Vermin is a champion of numerous other repugnant forms of life—rats and spiders being among his favorite.  His most foul creation are the ratlings.  Large varieties of filthy rats, fed on human carrion and blasted with foul magicks, have over generations of shepherding at the Master of Vermin's hand become vaguely anthropomorphic.  Walking on two legs and using their front paws as hands, the ratlings are as intelligent as humans, and as inventive, but they know nothing but filth, hatred, and cruelty.  Master of Vermin has clearly set them up to replace humanity when the time is right.  In the meantime, they spread in small groups from their home in Leng, feeding on carrion and rotting flesh—human when they can get it—and hiding in the sewers and midden heaps of mankind's cities, poised to spread their plagues and diseases like the rats from which they were engineered by this mad sorcerer.

Gothan, the Mind-wizard

In ancient times before the rise of any of the modern races of mankind on the continent, the world was ruled by the might of ancient Atlantis, and the ancestors of the ancestors of the current races of the Three Realms were hunted, sacrificed and enslaved by this evil empire. Atlantis was so vile that it finally was cursed with destruction, and sank under the sea. The rump island chain of Nizrekh is all that remains, although these small islands were blasted lifeless at the time, and life has only slowly reclaimed them. The current Nizrekhi people are not descended from the Atlanteans at all, but more recent interlopers on the territory. Rather the cursed and degenerate grendlings or Wendaks are the distant descendants of Atlanteans who were on the continent during the wreck of Atlantis and so survived its sinking, but which were cursed to devolve eventually into cunning yet non-intelligent man-apes. Even now, they can no longer even use metal without sickening and dying, keeping what's left of them in a savage stone-age existence. However, some of the worst and most powerful Atlantean sorcerers, the first heresiarchs, as they style themselves, took last minute steps to preserve themselves, sealing themselves in lacquered caskets so they could "survive;" if their living death can be called survival, the sinking of their lands. Gothan, the Mind-wizard is one such, who's underwater lacquered wooden sarcophagus freed itself from the depths, floated to the surface, and was finally fished out of the sea by doomed and unfortunate fisherman, who paid for their rescue of the evil heresiarch with their lives and more. Perhaps the most frightening aspect of Gothan, however, is the idea that he is not singular; nobody knows how many more Mind-wizards of ancient Atlantis may yet linger on the bottom of the sea, waiting for tides and seismic shifts that will cause them to also float to the surface and plague the world of Mankind yet again.

Shimut the Flesheater

The Undying Emperor of a now undead Empire, the best thing about Shimut the Flesheater is his relative distance from the Three Realms. His lands border the Corsair Coast to the south, in the cursed and shunned Dead Lands desert, once known as the Empire of Taremu-Atum. Today this area is only the province of the most desperate and foolhardy of outlaws and treasure-hunters, and few survive the sands of that blasted land for long. Those that do return are often not right in the head ever-after. Although Shimut is the undisputed lord of this land, he rules with a light touch, allowing the numerous restless dead or the foolish mortal to wander freely. When he does venture out of his black pyramid made of obsidian deep in the desert, the region shakes in fear... but he spends most of his time in contemplative torpor.

Djemma Mennefer, the Gnomic

The cautious Fate Spinner who spends her time plotting massive webs of conspiracy that last for centuries at a time, Djemma Mennefer is driven by fear; fear of eventual death, fear of loss of control. Her lack of overt action has often led others to under-estimate her power, but it really is only due to her extremely cautious and patient nature. Djemma is also famous as a seer of sorts, and she is consulted on occasion by the other heresiarchs, and will even entertain petitions by mortals for her wisdom, although the cost of her consultation is often more than most can pay. In this sense, she can serve in the setting a role not unlike the Graeae of Greek mythology, portrayed as the Stygian Witches in the classic Clash of the Titans movie.

Seggeir the Hoarfell King

A rival of sorts of Arzana because of their common interest in destroying the world with weather, Seggeir is a truculent and combative heresiarch, who doesn't get along well with his colleagues, and has seen his plans suffer as a result of his frequent clashes with them. His preferred state for the world would be frozen and trapped forever in ice. He mostly maintains a presence far to the north, in the land of Thule, beyond the Wolfwood and even the Iron Mountains that rise to the north of them, but he has agents in the south frequently during the winter, and occasionally even travels on errands of his own. Many legends of spirits of the winter stalking outside of towns and settlements in the north are probably attributable, when they are real, to either Seggeir or his wight lieutenants and servants.

What I REALLY did (like a monkey)

I was busier than I thought. My son called and talked for about an hour. I made dinner. Then my wife got home earlier than I thought. Etc. Anyway, I didn't draw the map. I did make a youtube video. I'll include it below. I didn't make a second one, or lay any groundwork for it. I did get distracted by somebody else's video that was another one of those smug, preachy RAW or die videos. I find that in general, RAW enthusiasts are smug, arrogant spergs with major trust issues. While I kinda see their point, when you get into the weeds for even a moment with them, you quickly realize that you don't want to play with these people. 

Not only that, most of their arguments for their playstyle, and against yours are just-so stories and strawman arguments created from a baseline of assumptions that are flat out wrong or irrelevant. The video I watched asked rhetorically several times, "are you even in the hobby?" The play culture that would lead to these RAW spergs is, however, sufficiently different that I'm not sure that it's fair to call it the same hobby, even though it's based on (allegedly) the same games.

Anyway, here's a pretty big copy/paste from a blog post that describes the playstyles, more or less, in question. RAW spergs tend to congregate towards classic, with some overlap with the OSR (although based on the description below, you'd think that the OSR was the opposite of it. I imagine that some of the RAW sperging is a direct reaction to trends in the OSR, honestly). Most gamers are more in the trad camp or at least variations on it (it's not really described super well in this essay, or super accurately, more like. Probably because the guy writing it isn't part of that culture, and therefore has misconceptions about it), and they see the concerns of the RAW spergs are irrelevant and kind of bizarre, like they're not even aware of what the point of the game is. It's like they're making the argument that because hitting a defenseless player in football is called "unnecessary roughness" and is a personal foul, fifteen yard penalty, therefore you have to use all of the encumbrance rules as written in D&D.

I'm not going to specifically rebut the video I watched; in fact, I couldn't even make it all the way through; after 15 minutes of about 25 in total, I was bored and irritated by it and quit. For some reason, the concept stuck with me, though. I may make my own video on the topic, without necessarily more than off-hand reference to the Basic Expert's video.

Anyway, here's a description of the three relevant play styles (out of six identified in the post, but I don't think most of the other ones identified have a lot of cachet or relevance to the hobby still; they're kinda weird fringe activities, or regional specialties rather than playstyles that are actually commonplace. And below that, my video.

1) Classic

Classic play is oriented around the linked progressive development of challenges and PC power, with the rules existing to help keep those in rough proportion to one another and adjudicate the interactions of the two "fairly". This is explicit in the AD&D 1e DMG's advice to dungeon masters, but recurs in a number of other places, perhaps most obviously in tournament modules, especially the R-series put out by the RPGA in its first three years of operation, which emphasize periodic resets between sections of the adventure to create a "fair" experience for players as they cycle around from tournament table to tournament table playing the sections.

The focus on challenge-based play means lots of overland adventure and sprawling labyrinths and it recycles the same notation to describe towns, which are also treated as sites of challenge. At some point, PCs become powerful enough to command domains, and this opens up the scope of challenges further, by allowing mass hordes to engage in wargame-style clashes. The point of playing the game in classic play is not to tell a story (tho' it's fine if you do), but rather the focus of play is coping with challenges and threats that smoothly escalate in scope and power as the PCs rise in level. The idea of longer campaigns with slow but steady progression in PC power interrupted only by the occasional death is a game play ideal for classic culture.

This comes into being sometime between 1976-1977, when Gygax shifts from his early idea that OD&D is a "non-game" into trying to stabilize the play experience. It starts with him denouncing "Dungeons and Beavers" and other deviations from his own style in the April 1976 Strategic Review, but this turns into a larger shift in TSR's publishing schedule from 1977 onwards. Specifically, they begin providing concrete play examples - sample dungeons and scenarios, including modules - and specific advice about proper play procedures and values to consumers.

This shift begins with the publication of Holmes Basic (1977) and Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth (1977), before eventually culminating in AD&D (1977-1979) and the Mentzer-written BECMI (1983-1986) line. Judges Guild, the RPGA, Dragon Magazine, and even other publishers (e.g. Mayfair Games) get on board with this and spread Classic norms around before Gygax and Mentzer leave TSR in late 1985 / early 1986. Judges Guild  loses its license to print D&D material in 1985, and the RPGA's tournaments have shifted away from classic play by about 1983. Most of the other creators at TSR have shifted to "trad" (see below) by the mid-1980s, and so the institutional support for this style starts dries up, even tho' people continue to run and play in "classic" games.

Classic is revived in the early 2000s when the holdouts who've continued to play in that style use the internet to come together on forums like Dragonsfoot, Knights and Knaves Alehouse, and others, and this revival is part of what motivates OSRIC (2006) to be released.

One weird quirk of history is that people who were trying to revive classic in the early 2000s are often lumped into the OSR, despite the two groups really having distinct norms and values. Some of the confusion is because a few key notable individuals (e.g. Matt Finch) actually did shift from being classic revivalists to being early founders of the OSR. Because both groups are interested in challenge-based play, even if they have different takes on challenge's meaning, there are moment of productive overlap and interaction (and also lots of silly disputes and sneering; such is life).

This intermingling of people from different play cultures who initially appear to be part of the same movement but turn out to be interested in different things is pretty common - story games and Nordic LARP go through a similar intermingling before they split off into different things (more on that in a sec). Ed. Not really; I cut that part as irrelevant to this discussion. And Nordic LARP is pretty irrelevant as near as I can tell altogether. Other than this essay, I never see anyone anywhere talk about it at all. It might as well not exist. It actually might well not exist for all I know.

2) Trad (short for "traditional") 

Its own adherents and advocates call it "trad", but we shouldn't think of it as the oldest way of roleplaying (it is not). Trad is not what Gary and co. did (that's "classic"), but rather is the reaction to what they were doing.

Trad holds that the primary goal of a game is to tell an emotionally satisfying narrative, and the DM is the primary creative agent in making that happen - building the world, establishing all the details of the story, playing all the antagonists, and doing so mostly in line with their personal tastes and vision. The PCs can contribute, but their contributions are secondary in value and authority to the DM's. If you ever hear people complain about (or exalt!) games that feel like going through a fantasy novel, that's trad. Trad prizes gaming that produces experiences comparable to other media, like movies, novels, television, myths, etc., and its values often encourage adapting techniques from those media. Ed. Not exactly. Narratives are not a required feature of trad, although many bad trad games do indeed feature railroady narratives. Good trad GMs will tell you to be as wary about overscripting and overplanning as any other style of GM will, because it's a bad thing to do irrespective of style. I will admit, however, that inexperienced trad style GMs are probably more prone to falling into this fallacy than those who prefer some other style mentioned here, where exploration/sandbox is often held out as an ideal instead.

Trad emerges in the late 1970s, with an early intellectually hub in the Dungeons and Beavers crew at Caltech, but also in Tracy and Laura Hickman's gaming circle in Utah. The defining incident for Tracy was evidently running into a vampire in a dungeon and thinking that it really needed a story to explain what it was doing down there wandering around. Hickman wrote a series of adventures in 1980 (the Night Verse series) that tried to bring in more narrative elements, but the company that was supposed to publish them went bust. So he decided to sell them to TSR instead, and they would only buy them if he came to work for them. So in 1982, he went to work at TSR and within a few years, his ideas would spread throughout the company and become its dominant vision of "roleplaying". Ed. I've said this before, but I'll say it again; if not Hickman, than someone else would have done it. The zeitgeist was inevitable, because trad is what most of the people in the hobby, especially those who weren't midwifed through wargaming or boardgames actually wanted the games to be more like. There was a ton of pent up demand for trad-like products. I don't want to slight Hickman's achievements, but he was in the right place at the right time, and if not him, then someone else would have stumbled onto more or less the same formula. There were already modules that were previewing it before he wrote Ravenloft for example. Like this very post says below, Chaosium was heading there. WFRP was heading there. Everyone was heading there. It was inevitable that once Gygax's hold on the strategy was loosened that his insistence on promoting his favorite style would be replaced by the juggernaut in the zeitgeist that was just waiting to happen.

Trad gets its first major publication articulating its vision of play outside of TSR in Sandy Petersen's Call of Cthulhu (1981), which tells readers that the goal of play is to create an experience like a horror story, and provides specific advice (the "onion layer" model) for creating that. The values of trad crystallize as a major and distinct culture of play in D&D with the Ravenloft (1983) and Dragonlance (1984) modules written by Hickman. TSR published Ravenloft in response to Call of Cthulhu's critical and commercial success, and then won a fistful of awards and sold tons of copies themselves. 

Within a few years, the idea of "roleplaying, not rollplaying" and the importance of a Dungeon Master creating an elaborate, emotionally-satisfying narrative had taken over. I think probably the ability to import terms and ideas from other art forms probably helped a great deal as well, since understanding trad could be done by anyone who'd gone through a few humanities classes in university. Ed. Or anyone who'd ever watched a movie, a TV show or read a book. But again, "emotionally satisfying narrative" is a red herring. That's not what trad values, or at least its certainly not the main emphasis of the style. But the very gamist exploration, loot, power-up loop was almost immediately seen as shallow and unsatisfying to a large chunk of gamers, and it became apparent fairly quickly that by "large chunk" I actually mean "clear majority." Classic gaming can fairly easily and in some ways better be replicated by computer games, even video games of the era were pretty good at it; Gauntlet, Capcom's D&D games, etc. The thing about trad is that it recognized what ttprgs offered that no other medium of entertainment did, and focused on it. It's not just a glorified boardgame or wargame. It's not just a slightly interactive novel or storytelling experience. It's a completely new medium with its own entire strengths and weaknesses, and a good trad game leans into that in a way that Classic in many ways did not. It's not at all shocking to me that it quickly became the biggest style, the only one that was catered to in official products, the only one that was really presented to players, and by far still the most popular today. I sometimes call my own style paleo-trad, in contrast to the neo-trad that he also describes in this article (not quoted here); it's trad, but tempered by my old-fashionedness about the game in some ways. The railroads, the GM NPCs, the "my special character" twee protectiveness of players around their characters, and just the whole pretentious theater kids arrogance of later trad products, like White Wolf's were pretty big turn-offs to me. But here, he kind of describes trad as if that's what all trad is like. He describes trad as bad trad and doesn't acknowledge the existence of good trad. He might well be a RAW sperg himself, although maybe I'm reaching by reading that much between the lines.

Trad is the hegemonic culture of play from at least the mid-1980s to the early 2000s, and it's still a fairly common style of play. Ed. There are other new style sthat have come up since the early 2000s, but it's wishful thinking to claim that trad isn't still a hegemonic culture and the most common in gaming. It's still "the default" for most gamers, except maybe some edges of the newer younger Millennial and Gen-Z gamers who are running bakeries and soap operas with their characters, or exploring the OC/Neo-trad sphere in online gaming.

5) The OSR ("Old School Renaissance / Revival") 

Yes, it's this late in this chronological listing. And yes, the OSR is not "classic" play. It's a romantic reinvention, not an unbroken chain of tradition. 

The OSR draws on the challenge-based gameplay from the proto-culture of D&D and combines it with an interest in PC agency, particularly in the form of decision-making. The goal is a game where PC decision-making, especially diegetic decision-making, is the driver of play.

An important note I will make here is to distinguish the progressive challenge-based play of the "classic" culture from the more variable challenge-based play of the OSR. The OSR mostly doesn't care about "fairness" in the context of "game balance" (Gygax did). The variation in player agency across a series of decisions is far more interesting to most OSR players than it is to classic players.

The OSR specifically refuses the authoritative mediation of a pre-existing rules structure in order to encourage diegetic interactions using what S. John Ross would call "ephemeral resources" and "invisible rulebooks", and that the OSR calls "playing the world" and "player skill", respectively. Basically, by not being bound by the rules, you can play with a wider space of resources that contribute to framing differences in PC agency in potentially very precise and finely graded ways, and this allows you to throw a wider variety of challenges at players for them to overcome. I could write an entire post on just what random tables are meant to do, but they tie into the variance in agency and introduce surprise and unpredictability, ensuring that agency does vary over time.

I tend to date the start of the OSR from shortly after the publication of OSRIC (2006), which blew open the ability to use the OGL to republish the mechanics of old, pre-3.x D&D. With this new option, you had people who mainly wanted to revive AD&D 1e as a living game, and people who wanted to use old rule-sets as a springboard for their own creations. 2007 brought Labyrinth Lord, and the avalanche followed thereafter. The early OSR had Grognardia to provide it with a reconstructed vision of the past to position itself as the inheritors of, it had distinct intellectual developments like "Melan diagrams" of dungeons and Chris Kutalik's pointcrawls, and I would say it spent the time between 2006 and roughly 2012 forming its norms into a relatively self-consistent body of ideas about proper play.