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.

 

I'm going down, going down like a monkey

I'm just blogging some notes for myself about what I intend to do tonight. (Saying tonight in my head brought the Phil Collins lyrics to my head, hence the blog title. Could have been worse. I could have quoted something from the West Side Story song "Tonight" instead.) My wife is going out with a friend, so I've got the house to myself. I'll blast some music, probably not really blastable music actually (I'm thinking I'm in a classical mood, to be honest), ramble into my phone to get the audio for at least one, possibly two Youtube videos, go ahead and edit at least one Youtube video, and then if I still have time and energy, work on another map. Ta-da!

Let's get a bit more into the details. 

1) I've been threatening for weeks if not even months already by now to make the next column of my Shadows Over Garenport 5x5 matrix. This one will be the one associated with the Tazitta Death Cults. I'll probably sorta read (with a few annotated comments) from my supercut blog post, and just turn that into a video with lots of AI images of the characters and places. I haven't been able to get a really great image of the Prophetess, but maybe I'll play around with Bing's DALL-E 3 a bit prior to this and see what I can get. This shouldn't take long to record, and it should be be too difficult to edit, so I anticipate that within a couple of hours of starting, I'll have it uploaded.

2) That front ends with a brief introduction to one of the Heresiarchs; the "supervillains" if you will of my setting. I've also been threatening to make a video about the Heresiarchy. However, I'm not quite sure that I'm ready for it. Some of the Heresiarchs have enough material I've created about them that I could vlog about them, but some of them are just a concept and after a few sentences, I'm not sure where to go with them. In order to do this, I'd probably need to spend a little bit of time fleshing out the characters just a bit.

3) I've been less happy with the label Porhomok for the jungly area. I'm actually thinking of taking some old Terrasan names from the Mk. IV version of the setting, and repurposing them to rename and rework this already poorly defined area. This implies that there's a whole Terrasan population down there that I haven't done jack squat with and didn't even consider. The Terrasans, if you recall, are kind of based a bit on the old thalassocracy of the Crown of Aragon, a dynastic union that preceded the creation of Spain as a political entity, but which certainly consisted of very European para-Spaniards; Aragonese, Barcelonans, but also Mediterranean islands like the Balearics, Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, much of southern Italy, much of Greece, and even parts of what is now southern France. So Spanish-ish, but not at all in the Latin American context. Although geographically Terrasa would be similarly situated to Mexico relative to the main part of the setting (to the extent that the main part of the setting is America-like geographically) it really shouldn't have any of the native Central American cultures as a substrate. No Aztecs, Mayas, Toltecs, etc. heavily modifying the criollo culture; this is pure Medieval pre-Spanish Spanish, if that makes some sense. 

But, of course, it is also quite maritime. It's on a coast, the Corsair Coast is a huge part of what I'm using Terrasa for. I can't assume that borrowing the names of my old Terrasan places will work exactly like borrowing their context, because rather than a fading empire, more like very late western Roman Empire being the model for Terrasa, it's going to be much more independent and scrappy. I'm not sure that the criollos and other Spaniards of New Spain in the Americas really can compare to the attitude that the Americans had towards being British, exactly. Sure, they had their revolutions and became the independent countries of South America, but I'm going to be using them in a context that is much more like America to Great Britain, in spite of the fact that the culture will be Spanish-ish rather than English.

In any case, I'm a fan of developing by noodling, so making a map even if I don't really have a clear plan of what I'm making right now is fun, and when I'm done, I do have a clear plan of where to go. This will replace the map I made back in October where I added Porhomok, Easternesse, and some other features to the map, and I'll likely concentrate on developing those newer areas just a bit.

4) Not going to do this tonight, but I'd like to do three things in relatively short order. I guess it's time for a nested list...

    a) finish youtube videos for the rest of the Shadows columns.

    b) finish fleshing out the Cult of Undeath 5x5

    c) add two or three more potential campaign outlines for future 5x5 development

5) Am I ever going to fulfil my vague promise to do some kind of solo play Shadows Over Garenport? I haven't decided not to, but I have more "important" things that have taken priority, so it's not imminent, that's for sure. Even the stuff that is "imminent" is taking longer than I intended, so I'm behind.

Where have all the cowboys gone?

https://x.com/IceSolst/status/1882279052113072194

The comments are sometimes kind of interesting. She wants to know why men don't do womanly things, and rejects answers that disagree with her preconceived notions of what men "should" do.

Vox Day pointed out that the pick-me girls don't seem to have any trouble finding out where the men are. Men aren't obligated to go where you want them to go and do what you want them to do. If you want to find men, then go where the men are, not demanding that the men go where you are. You're not nearly as interesting as you think you are, and the men aren't coming to be near you for that reason.

Classic case of toxic female narcissism.

UPDATE: Not exactly the same thing, but variations on a theme, certainly. Toxic female narcissism combined with classic Third World brown people narcissism who think that they're entitled to First World white people prosperity.

UPDATE II: Breitbart removed this comment. They aren't our friends. I go there because they're better than most of the alternatives, not because they're actually good. Honestly, my curated news from Vox Day and Anonymous Conservative is probably better, although also with big holes in their scope.

Progressivism... from the Z-blog

Not his actual post, but some stuff from the comments by the Z-man and others.

In my lifetime, progressivism shifted from addressing the material needs of the poor to addressing the spiritual needs of single females, the mentally ill and social deviants. Note that their concerns about racism are not tethered to the alleged practical impact of racism. It is about the spiritual crisis allegedly caused by racism. There is no practical program to progressivism now.

I think this is why Obama Care was such a mess. The joyous supporters of Obama did not care about health care reform in a practical sense. It was just another symbol indicating that he was the messiah. That is not how you get reformed through Congress. The result made healthcare worse, but they celebrated it anyway because practical issues no longer matter to them.

Progressivism, fully free of practical concerns, first celebrated the coming of their messiah, then when he was not the messiah, it turned into a burning hatred of present reality that has now burned itself out.

That one's from the Z-man himself. Below is from someone calling himself "mycale":

You can see this most clearly with big city governments now, where the government exists to protect deviants, bums, junkies, perverts, and criminals against normal people. The progressives see the dregs of society as their weapon against normalcy. And of course, this isn’t anything new – Bio-Leninism is a thing, anarcho-tyranny is a thing. Yet, it is interesting how clear and obvious the program has become in the past five years or so, particularly since COVID and the Floyd riots.

When it came to Obamacare, the progressives were quite happy to make health insurance worse and more expensive for normal people.

Jeffrey Zoar added to that:

The still unspoken truth of Luigi-mania is that the left hates the Obamacare they hath wrought, but dares not admit it, either to themselves or to anyone else. 

Xman (no relation, as far as I know, to the Z-man) says:

Right. Modern progressivism is basically female narcissism. It’s not about accomplishing anything tangible — health care, pensions, housing, higher standard of living, etc. — it’s about the dopamine high of claiming moral one-upmanship (one-up-personship?) over the bigoted Evil White Racist Males.

So what if Los Angeles burns? It has it’s first Lesbian Fire Commissioner, and it’s first Woman of Color Mayor.

That’s all that matters.

rayj adds the pertinent tangent:

Modern progressivism or Woke is thuggish (and totalitarian) because it is a female inspired and female dominated movement . . . in truth, a religion that already has replaced Christianity in America and much of the West. It persists because Woke’s opposition refuse to face that fact.

Neither people nor governments will cop to this. They pretend females do not inhabit a supremacist position in their nations — despite overwhelming evidence otherwise — and thus the nations are over-run by the Religion of Women, which is what Woke really is, an endless empowering of females and disempowering and demeaning of males. . . even of masculinity itself. The Prot denominations largely have been conquered and are now under the power of Progressivism, which is to say, under the power of women.

Folks want to believe that Woke is on the decline, that Woke is over, that Donald Trump will finish off Woke. This is absurd because the central characteristic of Woke — the cultural and legal supremacy of collective female power — has not even been addressed and admitted, much less conquered.

Trump is an Eighties-era liberal with a feminist daughter, who in four years as president didn’t even acknowledge the truth, much less oppose the feminism that rules all your institutions and slaughters your children out of personal convenience. Thus you declare victory in a war that has yet to be fought.

Well, yeah, I guess. But women are quick to reassert normal heirarchies when men snap back effectively, which we are doing with this current cycle. But Jeffrey Zoar also adds the observation:

When I look around, I see progressives in retreat but I don’t see them giving up on their incoherent “ideology” and looking for a replacement. More like hunkering down in their echo chambers. Increased polarization.

Anyway, just a grab bag of observations on current affairs. I neither endorse nor even claim to agree with all of them, but I think that they're all interesting perspectives worth reading.

OSRRR(R)? and possible Cult of Undeath (or later) column

I've read some more OSR theory discussions, and it seems that most people who pay attention to this kind of thing have all come to similar conclusions, although the labels differ somewhat. That is, that there are effectively three groups (at least, but three sufficiently prominent ones, at least) that are all somewhat associated with the OSR, and a least sometimes take on that label. The labels that I used to prefer are OSR, OSR adjacent, and NSR. However, given that the OSR adjacent and NSR believe themselves to be part of the OSR too, and identify as such, I haven't found that those are as likely to stick. I've seen a clever way of differentiating between the three main camps by utilizing three different interpretations of what the R in OSR stands for, which maybe would work a little better. I've mentioned them briefly before, but there they are again:

Old School Revival: the "original" OSR, focused on getting the retroclones out so that the original rules could still b used (albeit in rewritten "cloned" form) and new modules utilizing those rules could be published by referring to these clones. Although initially focused on 1e AD&D stuff, i.e. OSRIC, Sword & Wizardry (OD&D) and later Basic Fantasy and Labyrinth Lord (B/X) were developments here too, bringing the full gamut of retroclines, more or less, into prominence. There are other retroclones than these, of course, and there are more that clone more esoteric slight differences of old D&D, but once these four were out, the retroclone "need" was largely filled, and this original branch of what the OSR was gradually faded from prominence. Subsequently, two things happened: 1) WotC, recognizing the demand, made older materials available for sale as relatively reasonably priced pdfs or PODs, and 2) OSE (and to a lesser extent the Hyperborea AD&D clone) swept in and seems to have largely sucked the wind out of the sails of every other retroclone. By 2012, this movement within the OSR largely got everything that it wanted, and therefore is not a major movement anymore in the community. No doubt many people who associate more with this idea still play in the OSR space, and buy OSR products, especially new modules and adventures, but there is little talk of exciting new retroclones, and little effort that I'm aware of in pursuing the goals of the Revival portion of the OSR. Many online commentators speaking ~2012, called the OSR "dead" meaning that the community, having gotten what it wanted, went quiet and had no more need to discuss already achieved goals anymore.

Old School Renaissance. As the OSR got more and more into things beyond just the retroclones, or the availability of older editions, it started to coalesce into a number of "this is how you play OSR style" philosophies. As many have pointed out, this is not a faithful recreation of how everyone played in the 70s and early 80s, but it is perhaps a romanticized recreation of at least one playstyle that had been underserved since, oh, probably the early to mid-80s, in many ways. Ironically, the "OSR play philosophy" was antithetical to the whole AD&D playstyle, given that OSRIC recreating AD&D was what started the OSR in the first place. Gary Gygax, in numerous writings, described something very different than what the OSR put forward as a platonic ideal of how to play, although the pre-AD&D OD&D and B/X games, especially with a heavy DIY expectation is maybe not terribly far off, in at least some respects. The OSR community started focusing in on the simpler, older games, deliberately cultivated contempt for game balance, mechanical vs diagetic solutions, and a number of other things that would have been pretty seriously at odds with how most people played in 1980 or so, and then also started diverging in tone and theme (if not necessarily in mechanics) from D&D of the past. Products like Carcosa, Lamentations of the Flame Princess and the work of controversial figure Zac S. (who has now been pretty thoroughly canceled, whether fairly or not, by the RPG community.) Curiously, in at least one commentary blog post on the Zac S. situation, it made an offhand comment about "the Renaissance formerly called the OSR." But with the collapse of the OSR blogosphere (largely) around where the OSR was going, the pulling of the plug on Google+ where a lot of this activity was, and the collapse and cancellation of at least one of the most prominent purveyors of this version of the OSR, a lot of people considered this to be yet another "death of the OSR" or rather, that this briefly faddish phase of the OSR became much more quiet and no longer dominates the headlines, such as they are, in the OSR community.

Old School Revolution. One perhaps inevitable side effect of changing the OSR from a discussion on the mechanics, i.e., the old rules and retroclones which replicated them, to a playstyle and philosophy on how to game, is that eventually, OSR started to become--ironically--divorced from the very rules and mechanics that it was created to champion and bring back. While I like the idea of calling this the NSR, the label has had limited currency, and most OSR communities continue to talk about OSR products of this category as if they were actually the OSR. I kind of disagree, but since I don't identify as any kind of OSRian, just a sympathetic para-OSRian who's more old-fashioned than old skool, maybe it's a little cheeky of me to play gatekeeper to the label. I'm not sure exactly at what point this launched, but there are a lot of games, most of them very niche, and very... "why bother" quite honestly, alongside a handful of games that have become tentpoles, if you will, of this subcommunity within the OSR. All of these are defined by their adherence to the OSR philosophy, to the extent that that's really a well codified and accepted philosophy, while simultaneously deviating significantly from the mechanics and rules of older D&D and the retroclones. Many of them, ironically, bring in a great number of "storygame" affectations, like player-facing rules, meta-currencies to allow players to influence the emerging narrative, etc. Some of the tentpole properties include Into the Odd and Electric Bastionland, it's expansion, or Morg Borg and its various spin-offs into other genres, like pirates, space horror, etc. Cairn and maybe Knave. There's many others, but I'm putting forward just a handful of the more prominent ones. It's also possible that OSR-themed games that hew closer to 5e (deliberately) like ShadowDark or Five Torches Deep also fit here, although I think many OSRians would be more comfortable suggesting that they like a lot about those games, but don't really consider them OSR. But that gets to the final group, for which I have no label.

This group is games that may not have any connection to the OSR at all other than that OSR fans may also like them, or that their creators hope that OSR fans like them and hope to sell to them. While the former is fine; maybe games like Dragonbane fit here, the latter is just a cheap marketing gimmick, and definitely cause for more than usual caveat emptor on the part of the OSR fans looking at such a product. 

Maybe its a good thing if the OSR "dies". As a community, it doesn't seem particularly innovative anymore; even the NSR or OSRevolution's innovations are mostly overstated. And that community is particularly toxic too. Then again, most online communities are.

So, to give you something more DFX related, I stumbled kind of by accident into a Bigfoot War of 1855 narrative, which I think is both really ridiculous, but also really fascinating. I do have 5x5s that I'm working on that need more definition. I'm considering adapting the idea of the Bigfoot/Choctaw war into one. Maybe Wendaks will be the cannon fodder rather than sasquatches, but an advanced thurse of some kind is the "boss" of the woodland cult that's kidnapping and killing people all over the place. Maybe Wendaks are even slowly turning into sasquatches. It might be a little redundant if I do it in the same 5x5 as my reptile cult which is kinda sorta based on a swamp (instead of sea) remixing of The Shadow Over Innsmouth, but I'm confident that I can have that theme of dark occult transhumanism twice in one 5x5 and yet treat them significantly differently.

Not sure what I'm going to do with that yet, if anything at all, but the idea really fascinated me, and why not use it? In the meantime, I certainly encourage everyone and anyone to look it up and read about it. It's a cool story, even if it is mostly likely complete nonsense.

The story of Portlock Alaska will also play a role. The creepiness involved is pretty cool, and it allows for a slightly different feel than the more up front "Bigfoot War" thing. Mysterious disease and creepiness foreshadow what will come.

UPDATE: I never really gave my conclusion/summary of the OSR situation. As I've said many times before, I'm not old school, but I am old-fashioned. None of the OSR communities are really doing what I'd want them to do, in theory, but I am sympathetic and somewhat adjacent to what they're doing. I've never really loved the old rules, and I do have a number of quibbles about them; I'd want them to be significantly modified, so I'm not really on the Revival camp. However, the Renaissance camp goes a lot into gaming philosophies that I disagree with, and as Revolution builds on those principles that I disagree with.

However, if you ditch the principles, then you can potentially end up with systems that I kind of like. So I guess my preferred system, which I've designed (really kitbashed; I created very little myself) is in parallel to all of the OSRs. But in terms of community, I find that the revival folks are the ones I'm most likely to get a long with, and the renaissance guys have some interesting ideas. The revolution might be more interesting, but I find that community pretty intolerable, even when I might find some of their ideas for mechanics interesting, here and there.

The OSR themed games that I have the most interest in are the para-OSR stuff, like Knave 2e, ShadowDark or Five Torches Deep. Although they're not exactly what I'd want either, they're the closest thing within the OSR to games that I'd really enjoy. As long, of course, as they avoided the dungeon, which is my biggest disconnect with anything OSR. But, I've seen some stuff recently that "debunks" the idea that these games, specifically ShadowDark, are optimized dungeoncrawlers. Although they do do that well, of course, they also work just fine for overland exploration, or anything else.

Moot point for me; I have a system already, but I'm still interested in these systems and what's going on somewhat in these communities, at bit, here and there.

Another disaster week

This week is a bit of a disaster too. Not necessarily in the terrible way (honestly, last week, even getting stuck for three days at the DFW airport wasn't the worst, because I stayed in a hotel, so I slept OK, ate OK, etc.). I've had a terrible cold ever since I got home. A little before, actually. Sleeping well has been a real challenge. As soon as I lay down, drainage starts going crazy and I'm stuffed up and start coughing a LOT. When I'm awake and up, it's OK. Being vertical improves the drainage a lot. But, of course, I can't sleep standing or sitting up very well. So I'm kinda miserable and tired all of the time. Also, there's a lot of craziness at work, and we're pretty short-handed; two people are off on medical and one quit and hasn't been replaced yet (although I think he was reluctant; but he was commuting the better part of an hour and a half one-way. It wasn't really sustainable.) So, I'm not exactly relaxing and getting hobby stuff done this week, let's just say. I'm exhausted both physically and in many ways mentally at the end of the work day, and I'm lucky if I can veg in front of the TV and play some overlanding youtube videos or something.

Yesterday was also my birthday. While of course everyone likes a birthday, it means that I'm on the phone most of the evening with family, I go out to eat, and in my case, I got to make my wife watch something that I'd been wanting to watch with her to see if she'd like, and she couldn't complain. (First two episodes of Longmire is what I picked. I was kinda under the gun to think of something, and that's what first came to mind.) Dinner was, unfortunately, mediocre. I went to place that I used to like, but I haven't been in a long time, and I haven't been here in our new location, and the experience was less than I hoped for. I don't know if this is unfortunate or not, but I've enough rewards on my wife's rewards program for a $10 off, so we'll probably go back again relatively soon, but I'm not going to suggest it for a while.

I also went out to lunch to a BBQ place that I like, and I didn't find that as good as I remember either. Although that may in part be driven by the fact that I was back in Texas last week and had some pretty dang good burnt end brisket while I was there, of course, so my Texas style BBQ here on the southern east coast (sorta) was not as good. 

I've also had to chase around a lot of personal issues. I spent several hours on Monday at the DMV, for instance. I have to go pick up a car today. I have to take my wife to the airport and then drive out of town myself tomorrow evening. I admit to feeling a bit exhausted. Next week, I'll be back in my house up north with my son and daughter-in-law and their three little kids. That should be mostly fun and relaxing. I know my son will want to play Dominion all the time. I like that game, but I doubt I really want to play it more than two or three times all week tops.  My daughter and son-in-law also live there in town. Maybe I can even get another D&D session in with them? They're the ones that I tried to start Shadows Over Garenport with, but it didn't really come together in more than one session before I moved. And if I get tired and remain sickish, I'll probably want to lay around, sleep and read.

Sigh. Real life, y'all. My blogging and vlogging goals are not happening quite the way I want them to. In any case, here's a video to watch. In addition to what he says, I think part of the problem is people who try and make their hobbies into something that pays all their bills. Living off of your hobbies sounds fun, but I doubt that it really is, because it sounds too stressful to me. My own youtube forays are just for my own benefit, and whether anyone at all finds and enjoys my videos is immaterial to me. I don't do it for them, I don't do it to "grow my channel" or to even make some side hustle money. I make them because it's my hobby, and I like to talk about my hobby. There's too many people trying really hard to not work conventionally in the hobby youtube space, and it's not good for their content, honestly.

Ugh

Ugh. Last week was a bit of a disaster. I traveled for work to visit a supplier in Juarez (when you do that, you travel to and stay in El Paso and just pop across the border on a supplier shuttle during the day). Weather, however, made the trip back very annoying. Got delayed in DFW due to snow and lack of sufficient inventory of de-icing solution. For no less than three days. I was supposed to arrive home on a non-stop from DFW on Thursday afternoon, around 4:30 my time. I got home instead on Saturday at about 11 PM, after passing through Washington DC. I also got a pretty bad cold, so I was stuffed up, sneezing, coughing and pretty miserable. Luckily, since it was a work trip, I could call my work travel agent and they'd book me a hotel in Dallas when it became clear that I wasn't going to get a flight out, so at least I got to go sleep in a hotel. And although food selections were limited, I ate fine. In fact, the blackened shrimp and catfish on a bed of dirty rice from Pappadeux was excellent, although it'd probably have been better (and cheaper) outside of the airport.

It also wasn't all that bad because I had my phone with me, my music, and several books. I finished, on the trip, three books in fact, The Bones of Haven by Simon R. Green, Sandstorm from the 3e era, an environmental source book, and Dance of the Damned by Alan Bligh, an Arkham Horror tie-in novel. 

As soon as I got back, I turned to my The Cthulhu Stories of Robert E. Howard collection, picked up the d20 Call of Cthulhu book, and will read the next two novels of the Lord of Nightmares "trilogy" that follows Dance of the Damned. Not a bad start at all to the year in terms of reading. 

Next week, I'll be going back to my old house in the northern Midwest, which we still own and which my son and his family are living in right now. My wife will be with me for the weekend, but she has to leave on Monday to get back to work; I can work remotely. Of course, I'll spend a lot of time with my son, my daughter, my grandkids, etc. and maybe even some old friends, but I should have plenty of time to read on that trip too, so I want to make sure that I bring sufficient material to keep me busy. Sadly, a lot of what I really want to read I still haven't found which box in my garage those books are in. So I have three of the old Lovecraft trade paperback collections, I can't find the other three (I think there were six in all. Maybe I'm wrong and there's only five? I can't remember now.) I do have the complete works on an old mobi file, but I prefer to read actual books. I wonder if I should just read the ones that I have, and then go through the Kindle reading the ones I missed? Or I just read the ones that I have, then wait until I find the others eventually to read them? Or just read it on my Kindle all around? Or just read something else? It's not like I haven't read Lovecraft before. But for some reason, I'm jonesing to re-read him again right now. Then again, sometimes a little Lovecraft is enough; three collections of trade paperbacks may not have all of the classics in them, but it's probably more than enough for me to decide that I can turn towards something else after reading that much. After all, I'm also reading a Cthulhu game book and I have five more Arkham Horror tie-in novels to read sitting on my shelf.

Although I really like that mode of fiction, I might be in the mood to mix it up after that, and do something a little more heroic and cheerful. Maybe I'll re-read Raymond Feist's four Riftwar books after that. After losing three of them in a neighbor's move (I ended up with a few of his things too; it worked out OK, I guess) I rebought the original edited versions that I had originally had of all of those books, which I like better than the "director's cut" versions that have been in print for the last few decades. Thanks, Thriftbooks, for making them available! I have a few more books that are "out" as in not boxed up, and I have relatively easy access to most of the boxes that have most of my books. And I've got a ton of Kindle content to read.

That's the biggest gripe I have about our current living situation; we're in a temporary house that we're renting, but it's smaller than our last house, and we just don't know what to do with all of our stuff. I need to turn a room into a permanent office/library eventually, but that is unlikely to happen until we buy a new house here.

In any case, on the docket for gaming books, I think maybe I'll read my two Privateer Press Monsternomicon's next. I do have a pdf of the 3.5 update of the first one, but given that I don't care that much about the specific stats, the original 3e hardback is fine. Those are among my favorite gamebooks that I own too.

This week

First real week of 2025. First week back at work. I'm at work today, that is; tomorrow, I'm traveling all day for work, Wednesday I'll be at my destination in El Paso and Juarez, and then Thursday I'm traveling all day again. But both of my travel days will have me at my destination before 5 PM. Not only will I have plenty of time to read and listen to music on the flight, but after getting a nice dinner on Uncle My Employer, I have all evening—both Tuesday and Wednesday—to sit in the hotel and do whatever the flip I want to do. Here's my plans for the week.

• I just finished the second (of three) novels in the second (of two) Hawk & Fisher Omnibus collections, and read the first long chapter of the third novel. I intend to finish this novel before I'm home. I've got about 150 or so pages to read. Bones of Haven is the book I'm on. Although this is the second time I've read my omnibus collections, I've never read the prequel and sequel books. I probably should. In fact, I just put them on my Thriftbooks wishlist. I'll order them sometime this year.
• I intend to record audio for my Shadows Over Garenport First column Youtube Video, slap it into a slide-show/presentation style format and upload that as a new Youtube video on one of the two nights that I'm in the hotel in El Paso.
• I intend to eat BBQ at Rudy's. Maybe twice, if I can't find another nearby restaurant that looks as good. Of course, I don't live in the northern midwest anymore; I now live back in the south, so getting good BBQ isn't nearly as hard as it used to. That said, Carolina styles of BBQ aren't the same as Texas, and Texas is the best. And not just because I grew up there. But Texas style seems to have spread and I can get it pretty good here too. But still. If I can get it and work can pay for it, and I'm in Texas while I'm doing it; of course I'm going to. Now, if only there were a Pappadeaux's or a Double Dave's in El Paso, I'd really be good to go. Sigh. I can probably get lunch at Pappadeux during my layover in the DFW airport on the way home, at least.
• I intend to finally finish Sandstorm, the 3.5 era book that I've been reading for months now. I knew that that was going to be tougher to get through than I hoped, but it was even worse than I thought. It's just painfully tedious to read those environmental books nowadays. I just don't have much interest in the super rulesy approach of 3.x, and most of the ideas that it has really aren't all that interesting. My review of it now, were I to write another one to replace the one I wrote years ago, would be even less positive than my already desultory earlier effort.
• Just in case I have time, I'll also bring the first of the first of the Lord of Nightmares Arkham Horrors trilogy. It took me forever to track down the third book, which I foolishly didn't buy when it was still in print. Now that I have it, I have hardly any memory of the first two so I need to reread them. Sigh. Hopefully I'll be reading that on the flight back home.

Updates to DFX, Appendix and Character Sheet

All three documents have had some minor changes. Some of it is merely cosmetic; this is the only change to the character sheet, for instance. But both the rules and the appendix got another editing pass, and some errors were corrected, and a few other things were reworded to be more clear.

And just so this isn't just links to an ephemeral version of the game (not that I have any intention of making any more modifications anymore; and I haven't for a long time. This is probably pretty stable now), here's a picture or two just for fun, from my AI DFX collection.

Dark Fantasy X Rules

Dark Fantasy X Appendix

Dark Fantasy X Character Sheet

An alternative to the cover art

Alpon von Lechfeld, in his study (above) and his lab (below)

Pulp Hero X

Back in this post on my modular modules, I didn't actually have a pulp hero module identified. Part of this is because I never actually did anything with the modules. Then again, there isn't really all that much that needs to be done. If by Pulp Hero X I mean something along the lines of Brendan Frasier's The Mummy or Harrison Ford's Raiders of the Lost Ark or possibly Hugh Jackman's Van Helsing, except also with the possibility of completely non-supernatural games, then what really needs to be done for Pulp Hero X that isn't already there in Horror & Macabre X, License to Kill X or Weird West X anyway? Pulp Hero X becomes more of just a setting than a full module, utilizing nothing new or original that can't be pulled out of the already identified modules. In fact, if Horror & Macabre X's default is a kind of Lovecraftian 20s or 30s, a la default Call of Cthulhu (which it probably would be) then Pulp Hero X is literally the same module, just played with a different tone.

Honestly, what does either of them need that Dark Fantasy X doesn't already provide? Eliminate the fantastic non-human races of Dark Fantasy X, redo the equipment section to focus less on Medieval-like items and instead include some "modern" stuff like guns and cars to replace all the swords and wagons, and you're pretty much good to go. You've got your Lovecraftian magic... if you want to use it. You've got lots of monsters... if you want to use them... and you've got everything you need to build a character. I noticed this when I made a Western appendix area in my Fantasy Hack X game, back when I was still more overtly Microlite derived. I replaced the black powder piratey and musketeer-like firearms rules that Dark•Heritage Mk. IV, the then current version of what is now DFX was, with six shooters and rifles that, honestly, would still be perfectly fine rules for most modern firearms today. Then I had more definition and detail around horses and horseplay, which seemed very genre appropriate.

For something like License to Kill X, I could do the same thing except instead of more with horses, do something about vehicle chases, including car chases, and have more detail and definition around guns because those seem genre appropriate. 

The modules under this paradigm can be as simple as a one pager detailing what elements of the DFX game not to use, and then some expanded stuff that's a little hyper-focused (to the degree these rules-lite rules are hyper-focused at all) on something that seems genre appropriate because the genre itself focuses on that aspect of play.

What brings this to mind right now is, as I've noted in a semi-recent post, is that I'm revisiting my Ruritanian alternate history timeline of a frontier Republic of Texas, except still existing in a Ruritanian section of the US way into the 20s, 30s or 40s, roughly, model railroad plan. As I've started to make more and more specific plans of more and more specific pseudo-dioramas on the layout, it's developing a kind of weird tales, pulp vibe. No doubt, that will make my layout even more anathema to the spergy crowd to disparagingly refer to anything unlike their boring layouts as "cartoonish", but I've long ago decided that I'm parting ways with the rivet-counters and operational spergs, and that my vision of the hobby is so different from theirs that it might almost be best considered another hobby altogether.

Of course, if I'm developing all of this Ruritanian Territory, as part of a fictional "pulp modern" Republic of Texas setting with all kinds of weird supernatural elements in it; archaeologists discovering "The Mound", Nosferatu out west, sasquatches, Dark Watchers, ghost stories, a kind of frontier analog to Arkham County, etc., then whatever I do with that setting for the model railroad plans certainly are appropriate for roleplaying usage too.