Hey everyone it’s Ross from Mythic Mountains.

It’s been close to 4 years now since we did a major update to the clubhouse. I think it’s about time that we revisited things.

In summary, I’m moving away from the stated goals of the club from 2022. I now focus on classical gaming and serious game design discussions.

That means that I’ll be covering no more indie games, or various tabletop game products. No heartbreakers. No more retro clones. Instead you’ll rarely see gameplay on the Youtube channel and you’ll see a lot more discussion of vintage gaming, the Braunstein school renaissance and deep, deep dives into game design. I’ve got lots of exciting interviews and chats coming up!

You’ll see me point to our other two clubhouses for gameplay, because that’s where it will be. If you liked our OSR actual plays we still have a ton and in fact we just had a fun dungeon dive in Original D&D in the same campaign setting from the Rappan Athuk series that is going stronger than ever.

If you like our Classic Traveller gameplay we have a new channel for that also.

We still have one campaign left to reveal here, which I’m very excited about, Dolmenwood, using James Spahn The Heroes Journey. That will be releasing immediately following the conclusion of the Dragon Town series.

So that’s what’s happening, let’s talk about how we got here.

The history of Mythic Mountains

2018 was established as a group in Berea called simply “Berea Kentucky D&D.”

In 2019 it became “Central Kentucky D&D” and games were played in Nicholasville, Lexington, Richmond, Berea, Mount Vernon and Independence KY.

In 2020 it went online and remained Central Ky D&D but just prior to 2021 became Mythic Mountains D&D, to reflect the global membership while making a loving nod to our roots. The focus at the time was a sprawling network of 5e west marches games which plugged into campaigns.

At the time Mythic Mountains play club was an international play club, we had multiple 5e campaigns all of which had a West Marches component, all 1:1 time, downtime orders and a campaign layer including high level play. That’s right! Proto-Braunstein from the very beginning.

Two major problems

One was cultural. After the death of George Floyd my immediate instinct was to try to understand, and to be welcoming. This was at the core DNA of Mythic Mountains from the beginning. Those efforts failed. I discovered I needed to protect the club if there was to be a club at all. The tabletop space online was violent, hateful, unsafe, and we were doxed. People accused us of things we didn’t do. It was madness. This was at the time far more common for me in 5e gaming.

The Brand Prison

The other problem was brand 5e. The entire ecosystem was a self centered phenomenon as if our network of Dungeon Masters and tables was some kind of free service to be abused and mistreated. Pickup 5E players in 2021 were awful for us. They were!

I discovered in 2020 the old school renaissance thanks to Questing Beast. People that played those games were more invested, the games were better. My hobby improved 10x and it kept me from walking away.

In late 2021 at the dawn of 2022 we declared independence and ended all 5e games. Many people connected were hateful and removed. We established ourselves as folk.

For the next year this idea of “Folk D&D” was fleshed out and based on the writings primarily of Johan Huizinga.

Homo Ludens - The Philosophy of games as primordial to Culture

Huizinga describes the role of games in terms of cultural significance rather than the science of games in his book “Homo Ludens.” For Huizinga, a game is a unique kind of ritual which is primordial to culture. We play first with each other, the culture arises. For play to happen it has to be set aside, like a sacred ritual. Play can never be a survival task. Play is something everyone does if they are human.

Huizinga was in the generation of thinkers related to people like Max Weber who were concerned with the dehumanization of people due to industrialization but also the 20^th century isms which treated human beings as parts of a machine. For Huizinga, play had been reduced to systems and utility by things like state controlled schools and games publishers. That is, they were exploitative and not free and then not actually play, and then they could not produce culture.

The Official Game License Scandal

I was also influenced by the OGL crisis and what preceded it, when Ben Milton from Questing Beast in his video “D&D doesn’t need WOTC anymore” described two paths for the hobby: the brand gamer who follows an IP as a lifestyle and the folk gamer, who is basically in charge of their own hobby and not reliant on a brand holder at all.

These uses of the term are still sufficient and I did a blog post and video where I explored how they applied to tabletop.

Folk Gaming Declares Victory

2023 for me was a turning point, and you can see my thoughts on this in my article on Shadowdark where I said “Folk gaming declares victory.” With the publication of Shadowdark, and their approach to how the game could be used by others, which bordered on open source, it seemed like we may have slain the leviathan.

People focus too much on mechanical system and personalities and that’s not the point. The point is how it was published, how successful it was for sheer numbers vs. what was put in, and how it expressed itself in players and culture. I try to explain this in the article.

Fast forward two years later and the Shadowark gaming conventions became a kind of convention oriented organized play. Their massive kickstarter still hasn’t come out. Third party companies are selling expensive kickstarters on the back of the game. Instead of one great evil WOTC, we now have hundreds of little WOTCs that all take the same approach to gaming which Huizinga would have decried.

I love Arcane Library, and Shadowdark actually, and that’s not the point. Taking one or the other I’d pick Troll Lord Games, or Goodman Games over WOTC any day!

It’s undeniable, that the indie game companies that I follow, many of them have become either closed ecosystems that drive you to their products, or slop factories. They have the same exploitative goal that WOTC does. They’re just not as successful.

Criticism of the OSR and Indie RPGs

Scathing. That’s harder for me because I actually like what they make mostly. “One size does not fit all” here, the indie world has some innovation. Experimenters like and are doing wild stuff.

I have to be honest and say this isn’t something happening here or there. Retroclones no longer serve the purpose of accessing old rules and protecting legal frameworks to do so. Retrocolones, and in fact they are not clones, are designed to keep you buying from Necrotic Gnome, Mythmere, Tuesday Knight Games, OSR and so on.

Just like the enshitification of other industries, we are seeing the same thing on a small scale. I see the value in these games getting worse. Their quality is declining. Predatory practices and the use of AI are increasing.

There’s another problem with supposed “Folk D&D.” That is as soon as I started using the term, people latched on to it. They almost immediately misunderstood the assignment! They equated D&D with something like power-to-the-people, as if it had moral content. I don’t think Folk D&D has a moral quality, it can be good or bad. While I am definitely anti-brand, Folk tabletop games can be equally as destructive to the hobby.

And unfortunately I’ve seen a lot of this. The brand orthodoxy prevented growth, thinking, and even the game from being fun. It was a survival task, people had to play the brand game because it was a survival pathway in socialization. They did it because of FOMO, or other people, or wanting recognition. Now, I see, this is the same in “folk D&D.”

In some ways you can see my criticism as being a statement that the term itself has been captured by the thing it sought to defeat.

The new orthodoxy, which is anti-folk, which is held by most people carrying the label “folk” is that any authority, anything telling you what to do at all, in fact any truth outside yourself, is the enemy. This is anti-folk by my definition. I have always said, that there are objectively better expressions of D&D and objectively bad ones. I’ve always said that these can be observed, experimented with, measured, recorded and applied. To me, the Huizinga form of Folk gaming, requires a scientific mind.

So, I’m still much on the side of small games, old games, kit bashing etc. but I’m no longer going to promote indie games, heartbreakers, or non-clones. Just like how I said 5e can be a folk game, if those things are useful or well done I’ll use them. Getting you to buy things is just not my goal.

We are all sufficiently monetized.

The Culture is worse than I thought

Worse still is the culture which I’ve found hostile and threatening despite just wanting to play games and having an open mind. The problems with the 5e crowd are just as prevalent in indie gaming. Promoting violence, hatred, violating media TOS rules and federal laws. I have too much of a life outside this for that to be anywhere near me. This seems a nerd problem in general and I didn’t get relief from that by being “folk.”

The Near Future of Mythic Mountains

If you like our gameplay, check out those other channels.

If you like our discussion videos we’ve got way more to come! I’ll still be commenting on RPG culture and having my circles sometimes overlapping in spaces of indie design. I hope that the blog can be something useful and thought provoking for people. I’ll try to do the best I can to put work and research into each post and in the discussion videos.

That’s going to be the direction moving forward for a bit for the blog and the channel. My stats indicate for me that most people watching the youtube channel are white men in their 50’s from North America. Of those the majority are there because they like OSR actual plays. I don’t have stats on this blog. I’ve had a good experience with substack though and hope it continues in it’s quality. Usually people here are very thoughtful and are keen to go deep as a matter of personal pleasure and I find it challenging and rewarding.

If you are that Gen X gamer though, go check out Otherworld! If you like mowing the yard and listening to people play D&D or getting ideas or perspectives of people playing classical games, that’s where you’ll find it now.

Very few people watched our indie game videos anyway. I hope you’ve enjoyed what we’ve put out, stick around for Dolmenwood. And I hope we gave you some good material. Farewell for now I suppose.

And if you are new here and you came for the discussion videos, the Braunstein School Renaissance content or game design, welcome! I think we have some amazing things in store.

Either way, I’d like to know what you think. Are you one of the few people that enjoyed our indie content? Are you here mostly for the OSR actual plays? For those that follow our videos and blogs regularly and are subscribed or watch, tell me what was good here for you?

And God bless all of you, I have no enemies but the shadow of my own ego.

(Video format as well for those that prefer:)

Those that follow my videos and clubhouse gameplay know that as a gamer, I’m an advocate of systems matter as well as using the rules of the game.

From this, you might imagine I would be bothered by what is likely the predominant form of Dungeons and Dragons table play which is often derisively called “calvin-ball”. That is, the group does a kind of free form adult make-believe, haphazardly-sometimes applying rules.

For those of us in D&D blogs, YouTube videos, conventions and purchasing boutique mad-genius pdfs on itch.io you can begin to get the impression that all of these ideas and acronyms we discuss are the most important thing in RPGs. In a way they can be in the sense of an adoption curve. In the real world of the majority of D&D tables, I don’t think they matter at all. I suspect most people who play D&D regularly don’t know what “OSR” or “PBTA” are nor Hickman, Ron Edwards, Gygax or Chris McDowall.

In this recent article by Troy Press the blog author hosted a omnibus survey of 1,253 U.S. adults recruited from online panels, of whom several played D&D and questions were asked about how they viewed the rules of the game.

The results are quite predictable, and of these participants it’s worth noting they are passionate enough about the game to be found for an online survey panel. It’s likely that things such as the Orr Report are of those passionate enough to be playing on a virtual tabletop, and Wizards of the Coast own survey data likely has the same major sampling bias.

That is to say, these are some of the most passionate tabletop gamers and don’t even represent the majority who simply play with their friends offline.

The results indicate that most people simply don’t know the rules of the game at all, itt is a freeform, imaginative experience.

I have often argued this is the reality of most D&D play. I have some new evidence that strengthens the claim that 90% of tables simply “make it up” and don’t use the rules, and that further, this is an inherent quality to D&D itself which arises naturally in play.

First, an experiment with my Daughter which you can see parts of here and here. My Daughter was 2 when she started and is no 4. She has had absolutely no exposure to D&D culture whatsoever. A true “tabula rasa” experiment, if you will. Furthermore, I stress very generic terms when I talk about the game rather than complex ones and acronyms. I say things like “the adventure game” and “the game board” etc.

Despite this I noticed something very interesting. My Daughter naturally started playing in a style resembling what others do in D&D culture. With no exposure to it at all, she naturally just began calling the game “D&D” and talking about her Character and so on.

I began playing with my nephew who is 10, he played for the first time when he was 8. He is obsessed with D&D now. I have several times had him play the Dungeon Master. He confidently, and without asking or checking, has DM’d without using the rules of the game at all every time. He is mostly interested in cool monsters and absurd rube-goldberg machine traps.

What about adults though?

I want to point out this the fan zine “Alarums and Excursions” which famously received a reply from Gary Gygax himself, where Gary describes folk D&D as inherent to D&D.

Going back to my own attitude on “just make it up” or “calvin ball”, you might find me decrying such an approach among the online ivory tower in videos such as my conversation with or . Here and here.

I myself am very, very deep in the rabbit hole of resurrecting the wargame clubhouses of Bath, Wesley and Arneson. For me, the rules matter a great deal, and are in no way in conflict with their open system (which is still most of it) and the exercise of abductive reasoning from good pulp fantasy literature and imagination. Clubhouses and Braunsteins cannot work without using a rulebook.

At the same time, I acknowledge that D&D as we know it today has inherent in it, a quality to call forth children’s play in the style of “cops and robbers” and still be a “fourth category of game” as Rob Kuntz calls it.

In issue 1 of Alarums and Excursions, the form of modern conventional table play is obvious, and it arose when people got the rules and just did what came naturally to them. (See below.)

The play examples in Alarums and Excursions are all about play acting and dungeon adventures. There is hardly any mention at all of wargaming, which wasn’t understood by many of the people that got the books.

This “folk” form of D&D, which would become current conventional orthodoxy upon which the brand is built, would eventually cement as the “true” way to play, described in the Basic Line of D&D, and in most supplements that were published after 1983.

The point is this “elusive shift” happened immediately, with most adults willing to enter the seance of imagination from the books, and the maintenance of a wargame required conscience thought and training, and an understanding of many things most people don’t understand either today, or then.

Years ago, my friend Jake, a co-founder of Mythic Mountains Folk Gaming Club sent me this story of when he tried moving away from the elite-online, zine-reading, itch.io pdf buying class of D&D gamer and tried to find people to play with in person.

I share it with his permission.

The truth is that Gary was right. There is an immune system which defends itself against the predation of the brand. That is, they can’t tell people what to do anyway.

Only those ideas and games which produce enough fun, and which can be remembered, will matter ultimately. For me the rules matter, but not necessarily the ones Wizards of the Coast needs to sell or make money from.

We recently concluded our six week long hybrid Classic Traveller Braunstein.

This is the ongoing series in several parts describing the Classic Traveller Braunstein, it’s winners and losers and the after action review.

The After Action Review process occurs in 5 parts: What was supposed to happen, what happened, what went wrong, what went right and what we will do in the future.

What was supposed to happen

The point of view of the participants:

“I thought the game was to be about factions hiring Travellers to further their goals and ends while the factions fought and the Travellers scrambled by to get cash.” (Traveller)

“I think from my perspective the game unfurled largely as advertised. I expected to get up to space hi-jinks with other Travellers. I expected to be betrayed. I expected to die in character creation. All of these things happened. “ (Traveller)

“I think everything happened the way it was supposed to, but not the way I wanted it to.” (Patron and Traveller player)

“Patrons were going to be the movers and shakers of the area doing weird goals.
Travellers were supposed to be larger than life action heroes (Captain Kirk, John Carter, Indiana Jones), and go forth and earn money and get into hi-jinks.” (Traveller)

My summary/ The point of view of the Umpire

Classic Traveller by the book with daring pulp sci fi heroes taking on shady jobs from patron players for outrageous money, and patron players scheming for power. 6 weeks, 1:1 time, by the book.

This “Type 2.5” Voidstein was supposed to have weekly orders by patrons, but Travellers could move or act at anytime. The game progressed 1 for 1 with the real world. This meant that a “jump” in space would take you out of the game for a week!

Patrons competed with each other for power. Travellers competed with other Travellers for jobs with Patrons for money. Patrons could hire Travellers and have plausible deniability for their schemes, which was important because the “Background Simulation” would awaken and smite them if they weren’t circumspect.

The whole thing was meant to spiral out of control and crescendo around variables that got introduced around a central crisis and “MaGuffinstone”. Patron goals were pre-set and centered around various things which interlocked with the Maguffinstone. Travellers had no other goal than to make as much money as possible and were free agents, but could only make money by taking jobs from Patrons.

What did happen?

The point of view of the participants:

“I think I didn’t do a good job as the fog of war was too dense for me. The first faction I ran into reluctantly hired me, but I had almost no real info to go on. When I went to Jumpspace (the media patron) for info, they just shooed me away. So I was left with a whole universe to go search but no real clues or leads to follow, from what I recall.” (Traveller)

“Turns out nothing is sacred and my faction was eliminated before a single Traveller interacted with me (by another Patron).” (Patron player)

“I fumbled around a bit at first, but I accepted I should act like I was a Protagonist in a classic scifi adventure story, and started taking big risks. I lead an escape from a gang controlled station, then did a daring escape on ship (a roll of 1 on a d6 would have had my ship among the vaporized), then proposed to a Hacker I met (to have her join my team, but also because it seemed interesting and fun to do). So I think it went according to plan for me.” (Traveller)

“I tried to do the same, emulate the larger than life characters doing stuff but was met with “no” a lot. (By Patrons)” (Traveller)

My summary/ The point of view of the Umpire

It played out as advertised with a few hiccups that can easily be fixed

The times of events began to decouple from the weekly order process out of an imperative of the chaos made by Travellers.

Travellers sought jobs and Patrons schemed and set plans in motion. Eventually by week 3-4 every Traveller had aligned with a patron for high paying work and by week 5-6 was doing a session of live play based on the jobs and relationships they had built up to that point.

A lot of time was spent in Jumpspace by some Travellers and almost all had quiet periods where they were traveling in Jumpspace or interplanetary.

Travellers and Patrons had trouble meeting with each other and creating webs of schemes for fear of being discovered and also because many Patrons were inactive and unavailable.

What went wrong?

The point of view of the participants:

“The fog felt too thick to me at times. I’m not sure if that’s a result of my inexperience with this form of play.” - (Patron and Traveller player)

“Likewise. I had one order and then one action and then was toast. Not a criticism, but it was nothing and then everything in a single instance.” - (Patron)

“During play, there were a couple things I wish I’d know about the events and people of the world that led into this. It was a bit jarring at times; I didn’t actually know when we started that I was playing a Patron that had an existing history in the world, including interacting with another couple of the PCs.” - (Patron)

”If that will continue to be the norm, we should think about giving some of that info to the new player, if a patron or faction changes hands.” - (Patron and Traveller)

“I’d third that. Fog was very high as said before and information very limited in who was what and what they were, exactly. It felt like I had to do a lot of work to even find adventure and I had no real ties to anyone because lots of people were very conservative and cautious or were very obtuse in their dealings.” - (Traveller)

“I’ll say that for me it seemed to go from 1G to 7G very quickly. It’s like my Traveller was at the Stellar Burn Cantina looking for employment (while the Player was just figuring out how things work and skimming through the 3 books) and the next thing I knew he was going on a suicide mission involving a massive Fleet Battle! “ - (Traveller)

“Yeah, having the right folks for patrons/factions seems important (no offense, life gets hard for everyone!)” - (Traveller)

My summary/ The point of view of the Umpire

• Fog of war too thick

• Key patrons too inactive

• Not enough imperative for patrons to act quickly for a 6 week Braunstein

Some Travellers spent a lot of time on the sidelines. This was especially punishing since you spend part of the game traveling no matter what. Some Patrons either nearly ghosted or just wouldn’t be proactive in providing jobs. Because we designed the Voidstein to interlock the Travellers and Patrons so closely, Travellers that were able to manipulate seemingly distracted or distant Patrons for money even in solo play simply won, while others who were trying to be more competitive couldn’t get ahead.

Having Patrons that the Travellers depended on for big money payouts that would not engage with the game actively when needed forced me and other patrons to step in and ensure the game kept moving.

It’s clear that while this approach is fascinating and leads to a lot of autonomy and emergent chaos from participants driving things instead of the Referee, either only certain people can perform as Patrons, or there must be another aspect of the ecosystem which drives Patrons to Travellers more urgently, since the reverse is true (the Travellers had a weekly living expense). There has to be something driving Patrons to act other than a final win/lose outcome. Probably Patrons should only be those who are utterly committed to weekly orders and can fulfill them, when the game depends on them this much.

The fog of war was far too dense and needlessly so. Traveller works based on real world physics, so radio signals can only travel at the speed of light. However, the entire Voidstein took place in a solar system, where a radio signal can reach most worlds in about an hour. I made this needlessly complex and difficult, stating that people could intercept signals, and had hoped there would be an entire “spy game” of Travellers leaving dead drops with starport barkeeps and such.

In the end that didn’t happen, and a “dark forest” emerged where people were afraid to communicate across the solar system. By the end of the Voidstein I had mostly corrected this, assuming Patrons and Travellers were competent sci fi heroes and able to use their signals smartly and operate on that abstraction. Of course, if someone was in Jumpspace or unavailable, they were just unavailable. But if someone knew another entity in the solar system, by the end, I encouraged them to simply send a signal to known locations. This worked well enough by the end.

What went right?

The point of view of the participants

“I had a classic pulp scifi adventure.” - (Traveller)

“I acted my ass off, and had an absolute blast doing it. I was able to see my machinations take shape and cause ripples that themselves caused feedback. That was awesome. On the player side; I learned that, much like in Rimworld, it pays to be a psychopath. But luck pays much better.” - (Patron and Traveller player)

“I had an awesome time teaming up with a great group to wreck house and have an awesome adventure that ended in a cool space battle and an epic death for my traitor to be. The char gen braunstein was really awesome and gave some initial info/context for/with other Travellers.” - (Traveller)

My summary/ The point of view of the Umpire

• Everyone had a pulp sci fi adventure

• Schemes, plots, backstabbing, intrigue

• The emergent story of the scenario was really interesting

• Traveller actually happened. Fleet battles, sword fights, and travelling on starships.

I was thrilled to see the game mostly work as intended, most of all, that the solar system was left to the simulation of the game system, people had to actually get on starships and take the time to travel in space and yet it still worked. By the end of the game, every single participant had an epic, pulp sci fi adventure play out. And that all happened naturally from the maelstrom that is the Braunstein.

What we will do next time (for this type of Voidstein)

The point of view of the participants

“We should all be more aggressive and destructive. Lowering the fog of war could be fun. Maybe the TAS has a list of known Travellers operating in the area? Maybe a Cast of Characters, with publicly known info on them? Make the ability to contact people easier. I would have been fine to have just kept playing, and kept doing stuff, I was kind of sad it ended.” - (Traveller)

My summary/ The point of view of the Umpire

• Lower the fog of war through multiple angles, but keep to the rules

• Switch to 1977 Classic Traveller from 1981 Classic Traveller (not explained here. The 81’ rules work fine!)

• Keep using the rules by the book and remain dedicated to hard science fiction, distances, jumpspace, gravity, etc.

• Hand select Patrons and ensure they are committed to weekly orders.

• Allow for more participants to play both a Patron and a Traveller at the same time.

The parameters for this experiment were a single solar system with at least a few Patrons and around a dozen Travellers, a central conflict and a “maguffinstone”.

I am thrilled with the outcome!

Although some participants had a mixed experience, the experiment overall was a success. I’ve heard of some really fun sci fi Braunsteins, and even Classic Traveller ones (including the famous Moonstein and others.) However, what I had not heard of was a starfaring Braunstein, one in which participants must actually traverse space in 1:1 time in a starship.

This makes sense, and most sci fi Braunsteins so far have emphasized keeping the area local and small so that the emergent chaos of a Braunstein could come about. Check out this video by Jon Mollison describing a sci fi Braunstein that did attempt starfaring, and how it failed!

I was particularly inspired by this, but didn’t want to give up on the concept of Starfaring and being on starships.

But you can see the problem right?

If we are committed to a living world with 1 for 1 timekeeping, and yet you are on a starship, that means potentially weeks without playing.

For this experiment, one of the solutions to this problem for me was keeping the scenario based in a solar system. This meant that signals could reach from one end to the other, but using our selected game system, starship travel would still be an imperative for play.

Secondly, we committed to using the 1981 Classic Traveller rules “by the book” including gravity, vector starship combat and travel times. Anyone who does Braunsteins knows that this sort of thing is very important so that participants can compete fairly according to the rules and so that people can make meaningful plans and see where they intersect with their adversaries. Encumbrance, time, distance, rate all of those things are crucial in a Braunstein for it to work.

Third, I created a situation which would contract more and more around the participants, forcing them into decision points, alliances, tradeoffs and conflict. Something akin to the shrinking area like in extraction shooter games, the conflict of the scenario would drive them into intersecting paths of conflict and motivation. Additionally, the Travellers had weekly expenses, which I calculated based on the need for housing and food from the CT rules as well as a single mid-passage and two working passage per month, then divided per week. If a Traveller went into debt, I would only allow them to Travel in low-passage (risk of death) and they would be wanted automatically during Law rolls on planets and at starports.

As noted before, Patrons were motivated by their final win/lose state, and this was actually a problem. They certainly need some kind of weekly pressure to act and seek Travellers for jobs right along with the Travellers weekly pressure to adventure.

The amazing thing is that, all of this worked! This was a Braunstein that would see people take a week to travel. That’s a pretty reasonable time for a busy person not to be plugged into a game anyway. However, one drawback to this is that this really turned into a Type 3 Braunstein instead of a Type 2. That meant it was very hard work for me.

To revisit the earlier definitions from “BrOZER” and “UMBROS”; A Type 2 is a weekly game of orders. A Type 3 is “always on” and runs nonstop as events occur (even over weeks!) A Type 3 is strenuous, but possible as common sense applies, with the Referee completing orders as they can.

It became Type 3 because people would exit Jumpspace at different parts of 1:1 time, or leave interplanetary journeys. This meant I had to do one of two things: I could either “pause time” and have everyone catch up to 1:1 in bubbles, or I had to allow 1:1 time to play out. For the most part, I did the latter.

I definitely could not have kept running this more than 6 weeks, but I’m thrilled with how it turned out. The two major downsides, which contributed to multiple other points of failure: inactive patrons and thick fog of war, are easily fixed for a Voidstein set in a solar system.

Unfortunately, while this game worked very well and was tremendous fun we are moving on to more experiments so we won’t be getting back to this “Voidstein Type 2.5” anytime soon. In fact, our next experiment is a Matrix Game to resolve the political chaos following this Braunstein.

But after that…

We are working on making this a total-non-stop-Braunstein or something like a “Type IV” as described in UMBROS (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/541947/umbros-a-braunstein-of-dinosaurs-and-treachery-at-the-earth-s-core).

If we can figure this out, we will have a 77’ Traveller game with a large number of participants where Travellers are constantly at play in the background.

The “far future of the 1970’s” is looking very bright for us.

We recently concluded our six week long hybrid Classic Traveller Braunstein.

This is the ongoing series in several parts describing the Classic Traveller Braunstein, it’s winners and losers and the after action review.

In Voidstein Type 2 – Red Zone; participants could play as Patrons and/or Travellers.

Patrons

Patrons compete in the crisis for a position of greater power among other patrons, aka Factions. I won’t reveal the names of the participants to protect their The following were the Voidstein patrons:

Defiance – Anarchist/Socialist terrorists/freedom fighters (depending on your point of view). The defiance has secrets the government does not want revealed to the public.

The 400^th CruRON Federation Navy – The official government and military during the crisis

Jumpspace Media – The corrupt broadcast media organization

StarPeace – A registered NGO that is actually a cult sort of like Ahm Shinrikyo

Servonics Inc. - The front corporation for the notorious villain Solomon Stans

Space Vikings – A family clan of adventuring conquerors looking to build a saga of glory in the sight of the old gods in space.

The Cult of the Void – a shadowy illuminati of Tech lords that pull the strings behind the scenes.

(Later some of these would be eliminated, shift, or rebrand)

Travellers

All Travellers are talented ex-military free agents who do dangerous work for money in space. They vary greatly but all share that goal.

Emberson – He has a giant sword and not much else can be said about Emberson.

Tara – An expert hacker and administrative agent, the perfect chameleon, spy and infiltrator.

Larson Winchell – Very early on joins the Vikings and converts

Jet Jenkins – Handlebar mustache schemer and space cowboy, always able to get out of a mess

Kossori – A talented veteran and problem solver who would ultimately join the rebels

Yolando and Gerald – Meet each other early on and remain comrades, eventually joining the Vikings and then the Rebellion

Arthur Greenback – Maybe only enough luck to stay alive, Captain of the Neko

Gunn – A psychopathic former Marine Gunnery-Sergeant that likes stabbing

David Butler – A cantankerous mechanic looking for pay.

Gus – Highly skilled former special forces.

Dynamo – A swashbuckling, laser cannon wielding ex-Army Col.

Announcing the winners and losers of Voidstein Type 2 – Red Zone

Variable changes: Politics – 2. Mil – 1. Econ – 2. Social – 2.

Qualitative status of Vinfall Solar system. - Hegemony eliminated or driven off. Federation eliminated. Multiple factions eliminated. Solar system in shambles. Tens of thousands dead.

The patron winner is:

The Defiance!

Goals: Pol <2 Mil <3 E <3 S <3

Goal: Disrupt the current order in Vinfall to gain power and influence.

Both goals achieved with minimum losses and minimum exposure to the larger Defiance cell network. The Defiance began with the smallest pool of cash available to give Travellers but with a unique, ancient TL15 blockade running ship that could travel at 6G and Jump-5 with advanced computer software.

They gave the ship to be used by one of the Travellers and were able to use it’s software to “select-2” the bridge of the commanding Federal Naval Officer during the assault on Helios, the capital of the solar system, as well as use the ship to slip in with equipment and personnel to take over the station quickly.

They worked to alter the narrative by seeding rumors among sympathetic indie traders in starports and doing an interview with Jumpspace.

Lastly, they managed to not reveal their cards and work efficiently and quietly with the Vikings and Stans, essentially only silently moving the variables of Vinfall in their favor.

Runner up is:

Space Vikings!

Goals: Pol <2 Mil <3 Econ <3 S<4

Goal: Bring glory to your house by bringing low a great space monster (Hegemony Dreadnought) OR the top leader of another faction of equal power.

Goals were achieved, but the supremacy of the Vikings in glory and honor remains in doubt. The Vikings did not attain the glory personally of bringing down another faction but manipulated other factions in doing so. As a result, the apparent glory went to Baron Richard (deceased.)

The Space Vikings initially began with the brute force of simply wiping StarPeace off the map, which turned out profitable in goods and supplies but costly in men. After that, they worked with other factions and players to build the alliance that could ultimately topple Helios and the Federation. The Vikings started with a cohort of warriors, most of whom were wiped out in the StarPeace attack. They also started with a small flotilla of Viking Cruisers which were lower tech and slower than Federation Cruisers.

Victories and defeats:

Overwhelming victory:

Defiance

Space Vikings

Pyrrhic victory:

The Free Militia (Initially Servonics)

Overwhelming defeat:

Federation

Cult of the Void

Pyrrhic defeat:

Jumpspace Media

Travellers

The Traveller winner is:

Jet Jenkins!

Probably earned the most money swindling the Federation by putting them in a bind, requiring no danger or adventure to do so, but simply manipulation and maneuvering. Started the game with the second worst position on board a space station with factions killing each other, aliens inbound and running out of life support.

Jenkins organized one of the corporate gangs to make a daring escape and stole a fed ship. When he made it to the feds he convinced them he was bringing them the ship instead of stealing it. This led to a possible contract.

Jenkins had little money to speak of to start, so he found one of the most talents specialists on the ship and seduced and married her, using the most ancient form of currency.

By marrying the most talented computer hacker in the solar system, he was able to produce software for profit which enabled the assault on the Hegemony. The Feds paid the largest sum of money in the game of liquid funds to a Traveller for this: 1.5 million credits.

With the credits he established a private investigation firm, and immediately after establishing it began an investigation of what could end his new success with his new bride. This eventually led him to the highest levels of the Federation and a meeting with Baron Richard, where he duped the Baron into thinking he was a free agent for hire and an asset for the coming battle, along with him getting to know Dame Psyche.

The whole thing worked as a ruse to uncover what was about to happen, a tide of bloodshed. Knowing this he took his remaining credits and paid for passage off the station, leaving the solar system to burn with profit and his bride.

No adventure was needed. This was accomplished in Play-by-post in only a few paragraphs.

A masterclass of manipulation, scheming and daring.

The runner up is

Kossori!

Kossori was the most efficient for the highest pay off with the most heroism. Only coming into conflict with one Traveller who he’d ultimately become friends with at a starport bar after nearly killing him in space combat, he took a lead on a Federation job at a starport and came to Helios.

During an insane boarding of an alien Dreadnought, Kossori worked with an expert team of Travellers, Marines and specialists to rapidly uncover that the Dreadnoughts were exposed to an AI virus and helped to turn the fleet on itself, slaughtering every single Federation sailor in the 400^th CruRON and all 3 Dreadnoughts to prevent the virus from exposing the rest of the Federation and Sophont space, likely saving untold lives.

After returning, he agreed to stay on as a freedom fighter with Solomon Stans and Stans paid him a straight 1 million credits, making for the second highest payout per efficiency of gameplay.

Accomplished in only a few paragraphs of text, no adventures with the least amount of danger until the end of the game where, in one single adventure, he made a massive payday and probably helped save all of Sophont space.

A close third of mention:

Emberson

Emberson took a job prospecting a claim on a radioactive mine, taking the risk on a crazy old miner named Gus Chiggins. Along with Dame Psyche, they rode across the brown, icy wastes of Glumcrag on what appears to have been an ancient site of nuclear detonation, perfectly glassed frozen brown desert. There he fended off the Frostcoil using a vehicle mounted gun long enough to get off the nuclear glass and make it to the mine and the crew slew the vicious Ghort, the scourge of Glumcrag.

Obtaining the mine claim, Emberson arrived at Helios to cash it in and joined the suicidal mission to assault the Hegemony Dreadnoughts where on board the ancient vessel he slew robots and tentacled aliens with his broadsword during the activation of the Black Globe Generator as the crew escaped.

Emberson achieved the highest amount of credits earned for a single Traveller in the game, and participated in multiple adventure in both PBP and live session play.

Running list of Voidstein Type 2 – Red Zone – Awards

Most Valuable Player - Tara

Most deaths - David Butler

Most time spent in romance arc with the Referee - Jet Jenkins

Most betrayals – Testes Dynamo

Most attempted war crimes - Solomon Stans (Space Vikings are close 2^nd)

Most well intentioned - Kossori (Life science is close 2^nd)

Worst intentions – Solomon Stans

Most public exposure – Testes Dynamo

The next post I’ll reveal the results of our five-point AAR: What what supposed to happen, what did happen, what went wrong, what went right and what we will do with this type of Voidstein in the future with our lessons learned.

For the last year or so I’ve been playing D&D / RPGs with my 3 year old daughter. She calls them “the map game” or “the floor game” because we usually take a big map and play on the floor, or we draw maps on the floor together.

In that time, an interesting thing has arisen about what we are trying to do and how it works. It can work just like HG Wells’ floor game with his kids and we do that sometimes. We create a situation and then we take turns saying what happens next (obviously inspired by ).

That has been a lot of fun, but the adventure game is definitely lost. As I discussed with Sam, you definitely cannot do both things at the same time, you have to decide if you can say “no” because only the Referee knows there is a secret spell for the magic door, which must be found on the map. Playing with my daughter has made even more clear things about agency, choice and constraints in the fiction.

As time has gone on, those two things have become two different games. Sometimes we play “the story game” and she knows she can say what happens next. Sometimes she plays “the adventure game” and she needs to explore the map to find what she needs. It is often as simple as this:

“A story game means I get to say what happens and what’s behind the door.”

“An adventure game means Daddy keeps what’s behind the door a secret, and I get to choose what to do.”

Being able to allow the imagination to fly unbound in a collaboration is certainly a good thing and we enjoy it, but there’s something about creating constraints. It has something to do with the real and being human.

I believe I tend to see that tabletop discourse lacks those two things, and I think it’s part of why the mainstream product is in such a poor state. It is less human, and less real. It has to do with this hatred of the material, of the flesh, the pain, the complexity, the ugliness of human life. It’s more a hatred of the real than any real commitment to believing there can’t be anything real, though in the discourse you’d think the latter might be the case.

There’s especially something about the dungeon. I reintroduced it again the other day to my Daughter, the “underworld” I call it. She hated it. After 3 rooms, and her friend nearly dying in a pit, she said she’d rather not adventure in the underworld any further. Being in the mode of adventure gaming, I said “Of course! You can adventure in the world above if you like” and she was amicable to that. An adventure game is about choice in the context of a sub-created reality. There can be no choice without a reality.

Then, for the next two days, it bothers her. She’s obsessed. She talks about the underworld constantly. She explains to Mamaw how she thinks the underworld works and what’s down there. She thinks of monsters and treasure. I’ve seen this happen with tiny people and very old people. It strikes something. Hell does that.

That doesn’t mean she “likes” the underworld, she doesn’t think it’s “cool”, but there’s something in her that has to deal with it, even at 3.

In story games, she gets to say what happens next. Being 3, the story flies apart, loses all sacred pattern, she introduces silly and wild elements which crash the world and it loses anything both real and awful. She would want no dungeon in her story game, thank you. The dragons are nice, in the story game. I find that I often have to help host the story game for her in order for it to contain meaning and for the story to continue, though I’m learning right along with her.

In the adventure-map-game, she cannot flit to the other side of the map out of curiosity on a suddenly appearing airplane.

“No you have to travel there. It will take time. It’s cold, do you have a coat?”

She didn’t have one, she spent all her money recently on a pink boat.

“Then you are cold.”

I narrate the terrible cold in Dolmenwood. Winter has come, so the calendar and it’s weather tables say. She shivers and asks me why it’s cold in the house (it isn’t). Her single NPC henchman (mouse-friend) gives his shirt (I take off my hoodie and give it to her in real life). He shivers. She is sad. They need money for winter clothes for their adventure to discover what is happening in a nearby dark wood.

None of that comes from my caprice, my choice, my design. It comes from a map, weather tables, physics, distances, diegetic objects which are “there” in that sub-created world. The towns have items, an economy, travel takes time, distance, effort.

The difference is that the voice of God cannot come from me. It must be approached reverently, snuck up on, treated like a gentlemen, invited. Of course the sub-created world is a fantastical place, and of course it is also a place of possibility. But it is also a place of the real and the true. And that means pain.

To put it differently, the actual world is not merely distance, rate, time, temperature, and weight either. Much like the sub-created world it also has observers, points of view and even powerful things which peer back at the observer. However, the real world contains it’s mountains which the human body must endure, and as such, the mountains can help show us we are human. And so, the sub-created world must also have mountains, with streams that flow a certain way...

In adventure games the world says “no.” You die. The dragons are not nice. The underworld cannot be escaped. And weirdly, that’s exactly what allows someone to really choose something.

Lethality and pain is consequence. Consequence means choice is possible.

The underworld above all, makes a real choice possible, and a real choice lets us be human for a little while. It doesn’t make it pretty, or cool, or satisfying, but the honesty of the underworld is a form of reprieve, not from the real, but the unreal we are constantly surrounded by. The unreal, and inhuman.

Paradoxically, being a dwarf in a dungeon of monsters gives us a chance to experience the real, and the human. (As long as we track the Dwarf’s encumbrance.)

Richard Chase says, that this quality of story found in folk tales cannot be seized, it must be snuck up on, as if shyly.

“And what of the creative use of our folk traditions? ‘Great Art’ wrote John Jay Chapman, ‘does not come on call, and when it comes it is always shy.’

and also

“A true folk singer sings ‘by the heart’ and not out out of books. He never tries to impress an audience, because at his best he is a real artist. Sincerely he shares his love and knowledge of these things with you rather than performing them for you. He sings ‘ unthoughtedly,’ without self-consciousness. He makes his points without overdoing! He never shows his tonsils! Folk arts lose their magic the instant they are exploited sensationally.”

-American Folk Tales and Songs - Richard Chase

This element “outside the world” that is not necessarily the story, but it’s seed, and not driven “by the purposed domination” of the host or leader of the experience, is also not God, but we could hope to invite Him perhaps.

And even then, we maybe shouldn’t declare it so when we think we’ve got a grasp on that, but allow ourselves to be surprised, or disturbed, or to simply see. Or if we see nothing at all there, then maybe that is something too.

They survived their trip on the pink boat in the cold and completed the quest for the Knight. My daughter smiled with a new confidence, because she knew it was not just a contrivance that did the Quest of a Knight of Brockenwold, she did not simply declare it to be so, but a sub-created thing held with an honest and open palm, which could be cold, and even die.

These however, are the perilous realms. And we do not know if they will survive next time. It is not possible for me to know, since I aim as best I can to approach the tale “unthoughtedly.”

“Solomon Stans spun in his powered suit of armor in the direction of what was only a momentary instinct. That small mote of fate saved his life. A powerful Psion appeared behind him in the alley of the lower levels of Helios.

In one half-second Stans’ broadsword thrust through the mouth and out the back of the skull of Baron Richard. The last look on the well groomed face of the Baron was one of intense outrage and anger, but only a moment before his face froze into a grotesque collapse of any will or life. He joined the entropy decay he so loved.

Another appeared and his blade began to swing but was met by the expert spinning metal of old Stans. The old man could barely hold his own in a twirling, swinging dance of large two handed blade against blade, the sparks flying from the colliding steel against the dimly lit alley. Stans eyed the baroque and ancient sword that clattered near the body of his former ally the Baron and he quickly dashed to grasp it, sensing an odd quality to it. It felt weightless and when it leapt in his grip it appeared faster than the eye could track to the throat of the second attacker.

Standing in the grimy alley of the lower portion of the Starport, he was surrounded by dead adversaries. He looked over the body of Baron Richard, one of the most powerful men in the Federation. The Baron was beloved by the people, and they thought him a philanthropist, not a mind-power wielding cultist with an odd sword. In a moment Stans made a perverse political judgment to take the head of Richard and see his supposed friend to a final, useful task. Marching out to the crowds of the lower indie ports, he raised the famous icon’s head to the masses and declared that the Federation had slain him.

To this day across many solar systems they paint the visage of Baron Richard in the walls and decks of starports.

Already at the tipping point, the Independents of the station turned against the Marines. Poorly equipped and trained they drowned them in their sacrificial blood in a human wave.

The plot to overthrow Federation rule of the Vinfall Solar System had began. With their fleet on assignment Stans struck with his alliance of dissident rebels, free militia, former military and of course, the Space Vikings. A rag tag group of clunky old cruisers, a swarm of under gunned pinnaces and gunboats and a single bay of fighters sat at maximum radar range awaiting the signal to attack once they had the starports fire controls under their trigger fingers.

As the Federation fleet arrived they made the foolish mistake of accelerating their cruisers ahead of their support ships, arrogant in the notion that the station was theirs. As they came into radar range this quickly proved false. The old Viking cruisers ignited their plasma cannons and the station lit the dark night in beams of pulse lasers disabling the reinforcing ships. The support ships, seeing no chance at survival, loaded their data tapes to make an emergency jump and fled.

The Free Militia and it’s allies had taken Vinfall.”

None of that was planned by me. None of it was written. Everything I described above was the natural result of Travellers operating in opposition under a fog of war.

Those were the fateful moments of Voidstein 2 - Red Zone, a grand, science fiction campaign beyond mere roleplaying, with 17 different players contending for the fate of a solar system.

In this blog series I’ll reveal our “After Action Report” starting with this introduction blog post giving initial impressions.

Some of the adventures that were had:

• Hurtling in heavy wheeled vehicle across a nuclear glassed, icy world’s surface firing wildly behind them to fend off a massive alien serpent as they seek a claim on a radioactive mine.

• Reporters sleuthing out the truth among Viking, Vegan and Death cults.

• Desperately working to initiate an emergency jump to escape the clutches of a vast alien dreadnought under the deathly grip of a gas giant gravity vector (they failed and perished).

• Paying a counterfeiter to create a fake military contractor ID and infiltrating a battlefield marine operations center to clear a criminal ship of any local records.

• A mech battle with a gargantuan alien bug in a ruined city.

• Hiring the top hacker in the solar system, falling in love and taking risky work to pay for advanced medical tech to save her life, then getting out alive before the stars burn.

• A massive fleet battle of dozens of ships, fighters and missiles.

• A power-armored duel against a Cultist Psion with mind powers that could pop your brain like a grape.

How I set the game up

The Outlaw Void Clubhouse

We created a separate server and community for this. Anyone is welcome to join to the extent that we can maintain Dunbar’s number and moderate it. The approach is inspired by Bradford C. Walker‘s blog . Mythic Mountains has been a clubhouse since 2018 but we are leaning into the aspects of open collaboration, events, and social energy that distinguish clubhouse play, sharing memes, ribbing each other and having awards and prizes.

The architecture of the digital clubhouse is kept very simple. Individual participants should usually only see three things during a Voidstein: A general lobby where they can gather if there is an adventure session, their category with in and out of character sections and any section where they are in an encounter with another Traveller.

Grand scale, Type 2.5 Braunstein

We had 17 players including Travellers and Patrons, all spread across a solar system that was 2 light years across with a few breathable low ports, several starports, one ecumenopolis under siege and one major HQ starport. Patrons and Travellers all had varying and conflicting goals.

Does this sound complicated or ambitious? In truth, its easier to run than a conventional campaign of 3-6 players and a Gamemaster meeting for regularly scheduled sessions.

It’s called a “Braunstein” and it’s a type of conflict simulation where participants can act totally freely to pursue certain goals under a “fog of war.” That is, they do not know where the other participants are or what they are planning. Over the course of the game they’d ally, fight and stab one another in the back.

By having goals which conflict, Travellers naturally created their own drama. I never needed to produce “content” or provide “hooks”, my only job was to maintain the fog of war. At times I simply told players they had the rules and to adjudicate outcomes themselves.

BrOZER as basic organizing document.

BrOZER is a free guide for running Braunsteins. It has some general advice articles then provides 1-2 page formats for factions, and an example battle Braunstein.

I used the document as a way to quickly establish a format for faction sheets, giving them their brief description, assets and goals.

BrOZER also describes 3 types of Braunsteins, Type 1-3.

A Type 1 is the original - Like that ran by Dave Wesley. The game happens in a live session and there is a private room where participants can rotate and take actions, meanwhile they stay together and can plot and scheme.

A Type 2 is more of a general clubhouse wargame, though it can also be played in scheduled sessions. Participants write out orders based on situation reports, and the Umpire combines the reports to provide a result.

A Type 3 is the ambitious “always on” Braunstein which has the Referee react immediately and constantly to player moves in 1 for 1 Realtime.

By addressing the social technology of systems of play, by employing the Braunstein, living world elements, 1:1 time and other tools 17 players were able to operate with total player autonomy in an unforgiving Solar System sandbox.

• We used the Type 1 Braunstein as the basis for our Character Generation which set the tone for the game. Players went through Classic Traveller character creation, then entered a brief 2 hour arena style Braunstein scenario.

• None of the game was contrived. Other than drawing from source fiction (1970’s pulp sci fi) and apophenia to answer “why” to game procedures, nothing was “written” and there was no “plot.” Everything was either a player doing something, or the game as written. I did preparation for the VTT for scheduled adventures, otherwise nothing was ever “prepared.”

• The game occurred in more than one “mode.” Generally speaking a “Play-by-post” Type 2 Braunstein which fed into events that became a Type 3, that eventually led to adventures that were regular conventional adventure game sessions.

The Background Simulation

An experimental layer operated in the background. As Patrons competed for power among other patrons and Travellers competed with other Travellers to get jobs from Patrons for money, I also kept a series of shifting variables called the Background Simulation.

Inspired by science fiction simulations like “EVE Online” and “Elite: Dangerous” the BGS kept variables I had learned during wargames in the US Army, but fewer and simpler: Political, Military, Economic and Social.

As Patrons flexed their muscles the system would “awaken” in various ways and these variables would shift. Patrons desired certain outcomes for these variables, for example established powers wanted to see the Economic variable increase and most cult and terrorist factions wanted to see it decrease.

If a Patron pulled too hard on these levers through raw resources their actions would be revealed to others, through the military or so on, creating a “Dark Forest” effect in the Braunstein.

To avoid being found out, their shadow war among each other played out through Travellers. Travellers were free agents and for money would do the dangerous work of patrons. When a job was done by a Traveller a Patron had plausible deniability and the variable would move but the Patron and their plans and mechanisms would not be revealed.

The Gazetteer

I created a thorough Gazetteer covering everything from how the game worked, to what to expect from this type of game, to an example of play and an Appendix N of inspiration fiction. It was 60 pages long in A5 and probably no one read it.

My initial impressions

A+ - 11/10 - I will be doing this again.

Classic Traveller handles space faring Braunsteins with aplomb.

The benefits

We fulfilled the promise of a science fiction MMO-lite, or living world, where you could get on starships, travel worlds for jobs and get into adventures at your whim.

Seeing every part of the rulebook come to life

Nearly every jot of ink from Classic Traveller saw use, from the encumbrance limit based on strength, gravity, equipment, wilderness exploration, space combat, the likelihood of a gas giant in a system, to “flip and burn” space travel mathematics.

Classic Traveller worked flawlessly to provide a simulated science fiction world for Total Player Autonomy.

The strength of Classic Traveller is it’s quality of simulation. Everything is diegetic. Even the “character sheet” is an in world item (TAS Form 2). What the player knows and can do, the character can know and do. For that reason, it proved to be perfect for a Braunstein.

Lessons I learned

Tradeoffs

A big lonely space for some

Simulation led to wildly varying experiences for players.

Some of the players felt that they were on the sidelines for much of the game if they would have liked to have been more ambitious. Jumps always take 1 week in Classic Traveller, so some Travellers spent 2-3 weeks of 6 in jumpspace.

I don’t actually consider this undesirable, and intend to lean harder into this. Players were told this up front and were able to choose how to approach problems. If they weren’t careful and wasted time in jumpspace that was on them! It’s very important when thinking about Classic Traveller to never think of it as Star Trek or Star Wars. There is no simultaneity for communications, you cannot just chase someone across the stars. Space is big.

In this way Voidstein has joined the ranks of just about every space sim ever made, and for that I’m proud and not at all disappointed. The design problem in space games is always a matter of bringing together the promise of the open expanse with daring drama in the micro without picking either or, and a step along the way can feel like “a mile wide and an inch deep.” (Consider Elite: Dangerous, Star Citizen, X3/X4, No Man’s Sky and just about every space sim game.)

That we closed that gap and made it exciting for most on our first go is thrilling and I’m very optimistic about our “pencil and paper sci fi MMO” growing more and more.

That being said, it makes sense that in our seasons of play we may not always focus on the grand simulation of space, though we found it indeed works by the numbers just fine and you can in fact run a Braunstein across multiple worlds with ships that travel them.

Extremely random and unfair.

This was another thing well warned, almost ad nauseum and when it happened, really no one complained since they knew how it would be going into it. Classic Traveller is just unfair. One brave soul managed to die 5 times in character creation, then spawn into the Braunstein near a gas giant in a ship coming under attack and die a 6th time. You know you have a real champion player when he came back for a 7th (and that character would ultimately save the life of Solomon Stans mentioned above by patching a failing cruiser together with their high mechanical skill after a space combat battle.)

I adore how unfair Classic Traveller is and it lends itself very well to both living worlds and Braunsteins for this reason. It is one of the best games due to it’s random chargen where you can die in character creation, it’s lethality and that it has no vertical progression. It severs the attachment to one’s “man” on the game board, liberating people to have fun and take risks.

Living worlds, Braunsteins and multi-mode play

The type of Braunstein we did somewhat came into conflict with the living world aspects. I find these two things in tension: living worlds and Braunsteins. Because of the intense simulation, people struggled to bring plans to fruition and stay in contact with other space farers. This wasn’t always a problem, but it did come up.

I suspect that they must necessarily be kept as various types of game modes in conjunction with other aspects of play through clubhouse seasons, as Braunsteins are about conflict, and are more fun for the participants when aggressive action can be taken and drama can be had.

Really, both things can be kept in conjunction by having the whole clubhouse operate on multiple modes and layers at once and across multiple games. Not everything needs to be done all at once and in one way.

Teaching, coaching and building the clubhouse participants

(Aka my Gazetteer was too long and superfluous)

Clubhouse play doesn’t work like regular conventional play, it is more akin to intramural sports. Usually someone doesn’t begin play right away understanding how these games work, it takes time and experience and they get better as they go.

Documents which simply express these things are fine, but a “terms of service” is less useful for social technology than teaching and coaching players. This is an unusual arrangement compared to the traditional role of the Dungeon Master or Host.

It can’t be denied that the reason this Braunstein went so well and the Otherworld: Rappan Athuk Braunstein struggled so much, is primarily because of the experience of the participants that came from the former Braunstein. Having had their first taste of war among fellows, they came into this one ambitious, vicious and ready, and the whole thing worked for that reason.

Ultimately having a large gazetteer to serve as a breakdown of how all this works is somewhat of a performative “I told you so” like a “Cover your own butt” or “terms of service” which is no more desirable or effective than many of the other Human Resources type approaches to the game which have become common over time and have sought to systematize human behavior. These are human beings. If someone is resilient enough to play this way and enjoy it, they will stick around through some failures and confusion and come out the other side as a brutal Braunstein player (see our friend that died 6 times above). And if they don’t have that resilience they weren’t going to read that Gazetteer anyway and it was probably never going to fit.

Going forward

This is just the first impressions post, as we go through the after party, we will be working through the five step After Action Report process and I’ll be launching those about every two weeks on the blog as the videos are available on You tube of our Chargen Type 1 Braunsteins (Voidstein 1’s) and of our adventure sessions.

You can see our first trailer video upcoming here:

And the full playlist of all of our Classic Traveller content here.

As well as my initial blog post about Classic Traveller here.

I am hoping to get the components of this Voidstein and how to run it in the Classic TAS publishing process to share with everyone.

I am working on an “end pages” or “charts” collection for Classic Traveller as it is sorely needed for people interested in doing this. In the meantime you can find the Charts Supplement for the 1983 rules here. And the 1981 rules for the game from Books 1-3 here.

We are currently in the after party heckling each other to death about our stupid schemes, cockamamie plans, backstabbing and general chicanery. After the “after party” ends we already have scheduled our next experimental Voidstein Classic Traveller Braunsteins and we can’t wait to share more with you!

Until then, be safe out there in the void Travellers!

“That’s just storygaming!”

Nowadays it’s common to hear this slur in some classic gaming places. What they mean is that someone isn’t being honest about playing a roleplaying game anymore.

Storygaming was exemplified by games like “Dungeon World”, “Blades in the Dark” and “The Burning Wheel.” Like everything about roleplaying games, no one can agree on definitions.

Here is a fascinating article from 2017 by Axthetable going over the history of the term “Story Game.”

https://axthetable.wordpress.com/2017/10/23/the-origin-of-the-term-story-games/

Also check out Samuel James “brief history of Storygaming”

Story Games Sojourn

Bonus Ep1 - An Oral History of Story Games

In which Sam draws a through-line from Free Kriegsspiel to Braunstein to Matrix Games to Indie Narrative Games to the Old School (R) to the Free Kriegsspiel (R) to Modern Story Games…

Listen now

9 months ago · 5 likes · 2 comments · Samuel James

For our purposes here I’ll define it as:

STORY GAME - A game where you tell a story.

That sounds pretty simple right? Then D&D is a storygame? Already we are steering into conflict (and quickly discovering again the #3 Folk RPG principle link).

Adventure gamers do not set out to tell a “story” any more than hikers go hiking to make a story. “The story emerges.” For many who play D&D, it’s probably a mixture of things, but it couldn’t be reduced to mere story and you can’t ultimately place the story outcome as the first principle (as Mike Mearls said mentioned earlier). Classic gamers might have no story in their game at all!

The three forms of Old Storygaming

Storygaming as a pejorative – Storygaming began as the Indies, wild experimenters who made fascinating games like “My Life with Master” or “Dogs in the Vineyard.” They were soon faced with skepticism by their friends that just loved that Good ol’ 1970’s Fantasy Wargame.

From here an odd choice was made. Rather than embrace this new form that emerged from the “Fourth Category” of gaming, or perhaps rather than seeing it as the emergence of older things from the new, these experimenters came into conflict with people in D&D, and they decided they wanted their place in that world also. They wanted to be called RPG gamers gosh darnit!

This is the source of “Storygaming as a pejorative” for indeed, D&D is a specific thing. There are things which make D&D work well and things which do not.

Those passionate about D&D will in short order express their distaste at a Gamemaster who has a “plot” and who “railroads” players, and who can blame them? The promise of the open adventure, of making meaningful and consequential choices is the Great Promise of D&D. Storygamers seemed set on doing exactly the things people had worked hard to learn not to do in D&D, and they seemed set on doing a whole lot of arguing about those desires.

They also seemed to like the idea of usurping the role of the Dungeon Master. Lo! Across D&D’s history this has been a battle has it not? And anyone serious about D&D long ago learned that you don’t tolerate “rules lawyering” and disruptions that can kill this blessed communion with Cheetos(TM).

So really, in an effort to forcibly integrate themselves into something, they became the misattributed slur for those people who clung to bad behaviors like railroading and rules lawyering.

Thus, in the Classic RPG community when you see someone being overly performative, self-centered, demanding of pre-supposed outcomes and other bad behaviors you say “ew, Storygamer!”

Storygaming as product – Storygames were products. I have many fond memories of these. We played a 6 month long campaign of “Monster of the Week” in 2020 that remains one of my fondest RPG memories.

Storygamers also wanted a slice of that brand pie. And companies eventually moved from the more Avant Garde like Dogs in the Vineyard and “My Life with Master” to things which, while sometimes risqué (ahem - “Thirsty Sword Lesbians”) were often far more familiar such as “Monster Hearts”, “Dungeon World” and “Blades in the Dark”. Storygaming was no longer just “the Indies” experimenting, it had carved itself a place on common bookshelves right next to the giants. You could sometimes find copies of “Mouse Guard” and “Blades in the Dark” in normal book and gamestores. I once got “Kids on Bikes” at my LFGS but couldn’t get “Traveller.”

If you’ve read my article here you know I’m all about what I call “Folk Gaming.” That might sometimes get confused with something like anti-capitalism. I love when someone has an idea and makes bushels of money on it (see my article on the rise of Shadowdark here and my celebration of their success). However, the way money is made has an impact on a game. This is the tragic fact of the history of D&D. The Brand quality of the game is a cancer on the game, and well, that cancer infected Storygaming too.

Don’t get me wrong, I really have a fond place in my heart for these games. PBTA (Powered by the Apocalypse) or FITD (Forged in the Dark) games were the “threshold crossing moment” for many to come into classical gaming. I share this when asked about my RPG history. My third RPG I ever played was FATE, well before I had ever tried D&D.

These games lost the creative wildness of some of the Indies. They were often very, very complex, full of intricate systems (like Blades in the Dark), or often expressions of familiar games trying to include new ideas (Dungeon World.)

The consequences of this branding of Storygaming was that many people really just used these as alternatives to D&D. People just used Dungeon World as D&D.

This is part of a beloved folk phenomenon where people buy something and completely don’t use it the way it’s intended at all, and while I like that in this case, I can’t say it succeeded at being a “Story game.”

I see this sometimes when I watch people play something like “Blades in the Dark” online, and ignore most of it’s byzantine conventions and arrangements which defy the conventional table. They are just playing a roleplaying game, with flashbacks and stuff.

This old form of storygaming was just an interesting form of that Good Old 1970’s Wargame.

Storygaming as designers see it

The last form of old story gaming is story gaming as designers see it, what was written by the very RPG online on RPG.net, the Forge, and by the famous Ron Edwards.

The purpose of Storygaming for these people was to reduce “ludo-narrative dissonance” those elements which come between the creative agenda of the participants and the game, for example the need to stop and look up rules. This resulted in trying to front load design to keep things moving quickly, and it reduced the authority of the game-master.

Check out their model of design here

I think Storygaming in this way failed. It did not do that. Storygames are often dense and complicated, or in other ways insufficient at equipping a narrativist creative agenda. Furthermore, they feel as though they create the opposite of their intended goal. For example in “Monster of the Week” or “Dungeon World” with it’s “playbooks” and selecting a “move” for a character rather than just naturally acting in an imagined world, gives the sense of the entire game being a layer of buttons to press and activate between the participant and the fictional result.

This is one reason that people keep coming back to D&D. It just works for them feeling like stepping into the Otherworld. It works because of simulation. Torches weigh something, they have a quantity, they exist at shops to buy them. They are not merely quantum. This aspect of D&D, applied at many levels, keeps people coming back to the dungeon and stories result.

But D&D doesn’t accomplish the dream of a seamless story either, is it possible to Storygame? Is the chance of doing something D&D cannot do lost?

Two new forms of Storygaming

The Story Games Sojourn

Like most RPG things, the seeking after commercial product success altered the course of it’s design. Brands enshitify. And to that end, I’m always a proponent of “Make D&D like hopscotch” or “Make D&D like something you can do in a 15 minute drive with your son to school” (See my interview with Jim Parkin regarding the Free Kriegspeil Renaissance on that here)

To that end, Samuel James at Dreaming Dragonslayer has created a blog called “Storygamers Sojourn” and arrived at the desire for stories and the freedom from the strictures of traditional RPG design by another route.

You can see my interview with him and the overview of his ideas here.

Storygaming according to the Samuel James method is D&D as “eye-spy” or “hopscotch.” It is campfire storytelling. When asked if Storygaming is an RPG, he makes the decisive choice that was not made years ago.

“No. It is not.”

What if you owned everything the classic gamers accused storygamers of? The result is you no longer seek a place on the product shelf (though he has made lots of cool stuff and you should check that out here, as well as this starter pack of things to help), and you make a game that really has existed as long as humanity has been around.

In other words, Samuel James has taken Storygames away from the 1970’s tunnel simulator we all love, and made it about what is done around a campfire. This incredibly simple process can be done by anyone, anywhere at anytime.

It has a seven part process:

First start with a scenario.

Then say what happens next.

There is no turn order.

Build on each other’s ideas!

If there’s uncertainty, roll dice.

The host may veto anytime.

End when the scenario resolves.

To put it even simpler you just define a scenario and then say what happens next

That’s it. And yeah, you’re right, that isn’t D&D. But it’s something that anyone, anywhere, anytime can do. You can still achieve the goals of what most want with D&D, even campaigns of grand scope and continuity, but it’s key that participants not see themselves as piloting avatars (characters) within the world. They might champion concepts, aspects, groups or characters, but everyone must be able to say what happens next for the Story Gamer’s Sojourn process to work.

Divorcing any brand goals from the method, making it simple and human and embracing story rather than insisting on the 1970’s wargame overlapping, liberates the Story Games Sojourn from the weights which held back it’s forebears.

The Subcreation Renaissance

The second form of new storygaming is the Subcreation renaissance led by Crescendo games. These games can still fundamentally be roleplaying games.

Crescendo shares a lot in common with “The Burning Wheel”, but it is much simpler. You create characters with beliefs and the game interacts with the beliefs creating unexpected results. It shares the simulation quality of D&D though. That is, the world is a real place. The goal is the same as that of Tolkien’s Subcreation.

1. The world is real

2. Character beliefs are real

3. When those collide, unexpected things happen

The narrative outcome is achieved without any knowledge of what it will be by the participants, through a process which mimics a “crescendo” beginning with playing out beliefs of characters in various circumstances as the setting constantly confronts and challenges their beliefs, until it spirals into something loud and transformative.

Crescendo inverts the accusation of storygaming where Story Gamers Sojourn embraces it and says “no, we will not come to the table with any expectation of outcome, and we will take this world seriously and honestly.” It refuses any imposition, a “purposed domination by the author.”

(That’s of course not different than the stated goals of some storygames, as Sage LaTorra of Dungeonworld famously said “Play to find out.” But in all of those games the key difference from roleplaying games was the presumption of a narrative outcome.)

Tolkien famously began with a language, then a map, then all of the real elements of his Legendarium, all as he wove fables for his kids, and then the epic that is Lord of the Rings emerged from that.

“This tale grew in the telling, until it became a history of the Great War of the Ring and included many glimpses of the yet more ancient history that preceded it.”

―J.R.R. Tolkien,The Lord of the Rings

Famously, there were aspects of the Lord of the Rings which Tolkien did not know until he arrived at points in the story. Even long after it was written he had the quality of not knowing some things when people asked.

Tolkien believed that humans had a divine faculty which he called “Fantasy.” This unique quality of fantasy was derived from us being in the likeness of God. Since God creates the world we too are “little world creators” all of us, every single human. When we access this faculty, we “sub-create” along with God, making things unique and beautiful, just as each human is unique as he says:

“Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons, ‘twas our right
(used or misused). The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which we’re made.”

― J.R.R. Tolkien

Crescendo is a roleplaying game because participants still roleplay a character while the Weaver (aka the Gamemaster) roleplays the setting. It still has those trappings of D&D, and likewise it carries the simulation of D&D with an equipment list included in the game. That’s because of the seriousness with which it treats the world. The Weaver must make a real world through this subcreative process. Furthermore, for this to work, the Weaver must employ genuine myth in the world’s creation, seeking the enduring and sacred patterns of durable stories. The setting must be a secondary world in order for it to respond honestly to the Character’s beliefs, and for a mythopoeic outcome to result.

Where a storygame presupposes a narrative and D&D promises that a narrative might result, Crescendo creates a process which ensures an unexpected narrative outcome, since heroes acting on their beliefs must create a narrative when the setting responds to them.

Crescendo and the Subcreationist then solve the problem of Storygaming by shattering the accusation of being contrived.

This spring I’m eager to show a Crescendo Actual play series on our Youtube channel, where you’ll see me attempt to put this into practice!

The promise of Story

I’ve discovered on my journey through classical gaming that while the hobby developed through a primordial soup of what I called “theatre kids ruining the Army Officer’s wargame” that this conflict never truly resolved.

It never resolved on the D&D side of design which I discussed in my article “A Tale of Two Sandboxes”, and I found that creating honest, hands off conflict simulations, by the rules, produces a realistic fantasy world and infinite gameplay.

It also didn’t resolve to the satisfaction of the “Theatre Kids” side of the dichotomy, who have inadvertently attained stories through emergent qualities and shenanigans, but when setting out to achieve a story as it’s primary aim, often find D&D unfulfilling.

The willingness to risk, to dream, to experiment that the Forge and other Designers of 20 years ago attempted is an admirable quality that we ought to not give up on. To say “maybe I’m not playing D&D, yes I am telling stories” or “I will make a world and it’s people so real in quality that a story is inevitable” are two ways we can hope to achieve this goal.

Links and resources:

Please check out Crescendo - The “Ashcan” quickstart edition is out now for anyone to try for free!

https://substack.com/@thecrescendogames

https://crescendo-games.itch.io/crescendo-ashcan-edition

Check out Story Gamer’s Sojourn filled with Actual Plays, tools and ideas. Also check out “Dreaming Dragonslayer” and his itch page for examples

https://dreamingdragonslayer.wordpress.com/

Story Games Sojourn

Learn to tell play story games with loved ones. Collaborate and play to find out what happens next! Stories are something the clankers will never take away from us!

By Samuel James

https://dreamingdragonslayer.itch.io/

I have learned in my life, that the treatment of the dead is a universally shared human experience, and reflects on the elevation of a culture, the richness of the life and joy of people in a place.

When I was younger, I developed an idea of death and the dead similar to the inhumanity in Lois Lowry's book “The Giver.” The entire process was about “grieving”, or “releasing”, it was about “processing” and “moving on.” The very word “death” was often covered up in “celebrations” and colorful euphemisms about life, even in the midst of the horror of death. Everything about life was oriented toward rigorously ignoring and evading the possibility of death as much as possible.

Thank God that in October of 2003 I enlisted in the United States Army. There I was exposed, in time, to many, many cultures on this planet. First the Army itself, and it's distinct culture. In the Army, we sometimes got only hours of sleep because days were so packed with the fervent training we hoped would help us survive against people that wanted to kill us. But even then, we'd set aside time for whole ceremonies to remember the dead. Whole sections of real estate were developed in dedication to the dead. Their stories were shared at events and every-time we did something significant we'd place empty chairs and serve them as the most honored of guests. To be assigned to units and Guards of the dead and of tombs was the highest assignment of honor one could receive.

After my enlistment I'd travel the world, to East Asia, the south Pacific, Europe, and Africa. In South Korea I was taught to not even carelessly leave my utensils arranged a certain way for fear of dishonoring the dead. In so many way-shrines, in so many forgotten mountaintops and alleyways from Seoul to Bali to Ephesus, to the Holy Mountain of Sinai, people enshrined their history and the dead and held a view of reality that transcended the four year long view of life I had as an American. Peoples around the world had a consciousness which lasted centuries, and so great a part of that joyful, peaceful, enduring way of life was the memory of the dead, some of whom went back millennia.

Ultimately, we each must reckon with death and people will do this in different ways, despite the folk-ways, ancestral wisdom and faiths that offer meaning and peace.

“Hero worship” I hear this called. Really, I see a culture that is afraid of the one thing we all share in common. The dead were not perfect in life, and if they were, we could have no memory or part of them. It has been my experience that squabbling over the bodies of the deceased is the death of all connection and joy, among either families or cultures. It is no wonder that Brand Gaming has as one of it's greatest hallmarks the elimination of death, because death cannot be sold, it cannot be gamed, it cannot be controlled. It fearfully unites us. Companies that want control cannot have people be united, so striking the dead and their remembrance is necessary to peddle their distractions from life and connection.

Far more enduring than our squabbles have been the Mushairi, and the Izibongo. Chuseok Jesa, and Molebens. The memory of our stories and peoples lasts and endures despite what we do, or has so far. The wise stop, set opinions aside, light candles, sing or dance. They hurt. They are angry. They seek the consolation of friend and Divine in pain.

John Allen suffered so greatly in life and with patience, in the hopes that fleeting suffering is not the whole of human experience, not merely a horror requiring constant distraction, but meaning. Along the journey of suffering, he was kind to us, he was a gamer. He was a help to us not just in life, but eternally he helps us, as part of the whole story of all of us.

With the spirits of the Righteous, give rest oh God to the soul of your servant John Allen

Establish John in a place of refreshment, a place of repose, a place of brightness

Where all of his life's pain, sickness, sighing, and sorrow have fled away

Amen

(Special thanks to Dan “Alaric” Delgado for his big heart in remembering to place our friend on the wall and to recall him lovingly.)

To put it simply, folk tabletop gaming favors non-brand tabletop gaming, do-it-yourself, indie, home-brew, kit-bashing, vintage and classical games, new games and experimentation. The serious study of the roots of gaming or just as likely the childlike enjoyment of spontaneous and unstructured play. It explores the application of unique and non-mainstream ideas.

To put it precisely, folk tabletop is when the authority of the game arises from the table, not from other sources.

Folk tabletop is about the source of authority. Someone with a folk tabletop mindset or principles recognizes that the authority of tabletop activities comes from a consenting individual to voluntary participation in a table, where a “magic circle” is formed. It does not come from anything else, there is no shared authority with the table.

An initial note – This blog post is only about folk tabletop, my idea of it, and my experience with it. I do not speak for others, and this is not a commentary on anything other than games of imagination and miniatures. The sources of my ideas are based in the last several years of running an online, international play club as well as the Questing Beast video “Does DnD need WOTC anymore?” linked at the end along with other suggested resources.

What are the elements that make something “Folk”

A community origin and transmission. It's creators are often anonymous, or there is less of an enduring cult of personality. It's “leaders” do not govern, but there are often artists and leaders who by charisma, new ideas and the energy of galvanizing people to play will inspire others to do Folk tabletop games. It is often concerned with practical, simple and functional matters rather than hypothetical ones. It is accessible to anyone who wishes to engage in it and is able to. It varies from group to group and evolves over time. It is by nature non-commercial, though it can be commercialized and sold to willing buyers that don't require a product. It is of and from people, not corporations, vague identities, abstract labels and ideas, ideologues such as streamers, youtubers and bloggers.

Folk Tabletop gaming is less about brand gaming, merchandise, the adherence to intellectual properties, the discourse between ideologues, talking heads and bloggers, the division of gamers along ideological lines that are often reductive and binary, and the incursion of toxic cultural aspects into gaming that destroy the “magic circle” of the game, as well as the freedom and expression of the soul that arises from the game.

Anything which threatens either the authority of the Table or the “magic circle” they form is anti-Folk. These games join other folk traditions as the storehouse of cultural identity and the garden of cultural creation and so, Folk Gamers have faith that if people can set their differences aside and meet at the table within the magic circle, good things can arise from it.

Folk Tabletop gaming possesses the qualities of other Folk crafts, hobbies and cultures. Similar to fishing, knitting, meditation, and storytelling. For that reason it is available to everyone, owned by everyone (and no one), there is no central voice for Folk tabletop gaming and cannot be. There are leaders who serve, but they fulfill narrow purposes, change and are followed voluntarily. There are products, but none of them are needed.

In our current year, Folk Tabletop gaming looks like indie tabletop RPGs, adventure games, solo games, wargames, cardgames etc. on Itch.io, One Page Rules, crowdfunding, the Old School Renaissance and cottage industry companies like the Arcane Library.

It does not look like Games Workshop's “Warhammer 40,000” and Wizards of the Coast's “Dungeons and Dragons 2024.” Folk Tabletop gamers enjoy any part of those brand properties that serve them and leave the parts that do not. The authority is consented to by the individual and then arises from the table. A Folk Tabletop gamer does not feel compelled to adopt the authority of a company, an ideologue, a blogger, a YouTuber etc. nor anything they produce.

Folk tabletop gaming is anti-RPG orthodoxy, since all authority and the “right” way arises first and foremost from the table in actual play. Folk tabletop games are inherently variable and diverse. This does not mean that there are not good and effective ways to play games, and that these can't be shared confidently and with evidence of their results and towards the practical matter of the games having the desired outcome.

The Principles of Folk Tabletop Gaming

1. Games are based on consent - Tasks which do not require consent are survival and not games. Games are an important function in human life and culture.

2. The table is the authority - The goal, truth and authority of play arise from the table where play occurs, in actual play.

3. “It depends.” The right way to play depends on the table's actual game, and it's goals.

Definitions:

Games, play and secondary worlds – A feature of the human soul and human life. Human beings will project, by divine ability, a “what if” which borrows from the real world and also alters the real world in it's effect on the conscience and culture. From this dungeon of the heart arises the Divine and the Horrifying. It is the primordial source of culture. These things may look like football or fashion, but for us resemble pretending with pencil, paper, dice and friends.

Consent – Consent is the conscience act of a willing person to participate. Consent is possible to attain, can be known and communicated, and arises solely from the individual. The consent of the individual must be accepted by other people, but it is also up to that individual to express their consent. Whenever someone is suspected of not being conscience or willing, another person should not require the person to act, except in survival. Gaming cannot be a survival task.

Note: Consent has become malformed, codependent and unhealthy in The Discourse. Consent has often come to mean the opposite: i.e. the demands of the group for the individual to agree, often achieved through mechanistic and inhuman means similar to ineffective workplace practices when employers are distant from their workers and seeking ways to control them. Consent is sometimes conflated with other more serious concerns about mental health, which should never be entrusted to untrained non-professionals, and should be treated seriously. Among others, it has come to mean something else entirely, the demands of the individual for the group to change. The absurdity of the latter idea of consent has led to some claiming tabletop games shouldn't be for certain people such as those who have mental health disorders, or those who are simply different. This likewise is a form of control. Neither of these are true versions of consent or healthy relationships, and they are both anti-Folk in character. Consent arises solely from the individual, and it is up to the individual to express this consent. Both the individual and the table must be able to act equally to willingly participate. To do otherwise destroys the “magic circle.”

"In our modern civilization, the old play-element has been weakened or driven underground. What remains of play is often subordinated to the demands of utility and efficiency, or it is falsified by a spurious seriousness. The spontaneous joy of play has been supplanted by an over-organized, technical spirit that governs life, leaving little room for the free and noble forms of culture that once arose from it."

Johan Huizinga (Homo Ludens 1938)

The Table – The Table is the space where a game occurs. This could be an imaginative space, a “secondary world”, a physical table with friends and pizza, or online at regular intervals, moderated on a shared platform. The table is where the “magic circle” or a “temporary autonomous zone” or “sub-created world” arises. Within that world, the real person is safe and the divine faculty of fantasy can gush forth from the heart.

Authority – The motive force which compels a change in the world or on a person in reality. This could be a club organizer, the owner of a business, or the consenting person's control of their conscience will. At a table the willing consent of participants acts as a 'group conscience' creating an environment where the magic circle is formed. The Folk tabletop idea of authority is that this group conscience must be the source of authority in gaming, defining everything from it's limits, to it's venues, to the fictional content to the rules. In the case of Brand Gaming, this can be a market, a platform, an advertiser, private equity firms, a game designer or a company.

Goal of play (Telos of play) – The ultimate outcome the table wishes to achieve. This will likely include more than one thing, but is the main distinction between tables related to the game they are playing. Some games will value more challenge, others narrative and others simulation of the real world, to give 3 examples.

Brand gaming – The treatment of tabletop RPG's as a product. You can purchase it, subscribe to it, adhere to it. It competes in a market of money, attention and social prestige. It is accompanied by merchandise, splat books, and centrally controlled 'lore' which the participant awaits changes to and purchases to keep up with. This hierarchy bypasses the clubhouse and ideally goes from individual desires straight to the companies that make products. Unfortunately, companies exercise tactics to create a hierarchy that begins with the company, then flows through social groups like clubhouses or platforms (sometimes manipulating social groups in order to maintain this control), then considers the individual gamer last or sometimes not at all. Sources of brand power and ownership often do not lend themselves to the interests of games or participants of games.

The Discourse – A 'zeitgeist' which includes online discussion, the conversations between personalities, forums, and social media platforms. The Discourse can contain useful information and ideas. However, the Discourse is not the game actually occurring, at a table, in actual play.

To test this, find 10 groups which play Dungeons and Dragons.

Ask all of it's participants what “The Open Gaming License” is, or “Safety Tools” or one of the many acronyms like “PBTA” or “OSR” are. You'll likely find that the majority are playing games and unaware of these supposedly important concepts.

Worse, the Discourse proves to be a battlefield akin to Brand Tabletop's desire for control, consisting of various factions all in a petty, vapid, and rather sad, resource war.

While the Discourse can have useful ideas or simply be fun to explore for passionate gamers, whenever a force outside the table seeks to usurp the table's authority, it is anti-Folk in character. Folk Gamers place the authority of the table above talking heads and chatter on social media platforms.

The Signal – The Signal is a euphemism (based on the 2005 movie “Serenity”) for Brand Tabletop's ability to make Folk Tabletop look obscure or non-existent at best or an evil at worst. To test the signal, try typing “Dungeons and Dragons” into a major search engine, or a search bar on a streaming, social media or video sharing platform. You will, apart from historical entries like Wikipedia, likely find no folk tabletop games and all results will be related to the current version of the brand game. All products shown under product or shopping categories will be by a single company. It is possible for someone to go years and never know that folk tabletop gaming exists, even in the “information age.”

The signal includes retail and physical space. Try going into your average game store which stocks, at most, Pathfinder, and ask them to stock even “Call of Cthulu” or “Fantasy Flight Games Star Wars.” A person making this request will likely be treated as an inconvenience at best or an interloper at worst. Go to your Wal-Mart or other general retailer and go to the games aisle and see which RPG shows up there for the average person. You will likely only find one.

The Signal is also social. Try going to most tabletop groups and mentioning an indie or folk tabletop game. In most cases you will get ignored, in some you'll receive antipathy. I was recently told in one local tabletop group in response to offering a game other than 5e, “you are doing a disservice to new players, who will need to play 5e with others in order to find other players and groups.”

Since the OGL crisis in 2022, the Signal has been discovered by more gamers than ever and is starting to erode. Shadowdark is now dominating games from Garycon to Gencon, and online platforms like Startplaying.games are increasingly featuring many other games than brand D&D. Game stores and platforms which saw themselves tossed into the cold by a movement to direct sales are seeing that partnership with the Leviathan may no longer be working out. Third party creators have been utterly betrayed and fled the 5e market. With the seeming imminent failure of D&D 2024, we may see a new era where brand D&D is irrelevant. On the other hand, Games Workshop has seen the opposite and is succeeding year after year. Increasingly “wargames” simply mean “Warhammer.”

Summary:

Tabletop games are for everyone and their play arises from the participants. The western tabletop hobby is beginning to awaken from a dream we entered long ago, and it belongs to all of us once again.

References

Homo Ludens – Johan Huizinga 1938

On Fairy Stories – Tolkien 1947

Man, Play and Games – Roger Caillois 1958

Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs & European Renegadoes – Hakim Bey 1995

All fandoms are toxic – Ben Milton 2020

https://questingblog.com/all-fandoms-are-toxic/

Thank you, I will now destroy my channel - Dungeoncraft 2023

DnD doesn't need WOTC anymore – Ben Milton 2023

"Across Northern Tellgran, that great northern port of the Elder Isles, are the Atolls of Arik Brannia. In this year of the Light in the month of Noillag have those ports seen blood and war for the first time in 100 years.

The Black Clad Knight, Lord Madarok struck. An ancient Wyrm bound to his sword, he launched the black sails of the galleys of Sark for the first time since Valveros.

He made landfall at Pyade. There on that island did the ancient Arxine blade Tavaras' Bane become unsheathed by Sir Gervon against a demon taller than his keep's towers.

One of the last pillars of the Mage Towers that keep the Elder Isles from sinking for it’s sins could have held that day would the blade have struck true, but Sorcerers of Chaos wove magic to trick and sully the eyes of Gervon, and the demon grasped him and crushed him like a mere doll. So did blood, murder and chaos flood Tellgran.

Now we live thereafter. No help comes from Old Lyonesse. Foreign Knights jealously guard the central Isle and it's wineries while seeking obscure sacred artifacts that empower their secrets. Seas are infested with Pirates, being paid by both sides. On Pyade sits petty dark lords which intrigue one after another to ensure the next's downfall.

The Northern Isles are a sordid and evil place, but in their mountains lie the mighty treasures and weapons that could see it liberated.

Or directed to the service of the next one mighty enough to enslave it.

This is now the setting I will run in our years long running "Swords & Wizardry" campaign.

I didn't write or worldbuild it though.

We wargamed it. We played a wargame and this was the result.

The purpose of this blog post is to provide a glimpse into grand campaign, strategic wargaming which can move seamlessly from the strategic scale down to the scale of a party of adventurers in a dungeon or back again to kings and tyrants.

This blog post does not thoroughly break down the mechanics of the games mentioned, but explores the experiences we had.

At the end of the blog post I'll list some of the references, resources and person's I found helpful, as well as the general design and set up I used for the game. The latter should not be taken as a matter of expertise, but of experimentation on my part.

Grand Campaign

In my previous post I described how using a retro-clone of Original D&D along with some older gameplay conventions resulted in the most successful campaign of D&D I'd ever seen.

As I explored and researched this more, I began to dig deeper into that "Grand Campaign" era of play. What became obvious rather quickly was that the punk zine fiction culture along with wargamers at the time were indistinguishable from these early games of Dungeons and Dragons.

Why was that so? Isn't the very nature of Dungeons and Dragons about individual adventurers? Wargaming is about the opposite, the treatment of the largest scales of civil order or the breakdown thereof. How can these two meet?

In John Curry's book "Tony Bath's Ancient Wargaming" it reveals a lot very quickly about the ambition that some wargamers had in the 60's and 70's. For them, they weren't just playing "Axis and Allies", "Bolt Action" or "Warhammer."

This was not just a board of tactical units, nor was it a map like "Risk" moving assets representing whole continents or civilizations. People like Tony Bath were "Playing at the World" to borrow the title of Jon Peterson's famous book.

Bath didn't create scenarios for player factions to act on alone, but created the underlying rules of the world for everything else to unfold. For them, this was a real world, subcreated and honest. It was not merely a game, but presentation of real truths that allowed situations to arise and created emergent narratives and experiences. The world had realism, one might say simulation even.

I experienced this as I used the book. For example, in the section "How to set up a Wargames Campaign" Tony Bath says that by setting down resources and drawing the world map you can determine how your cities work. Settlements will sprout up around certain types of resources and by amount, with resource rich areas having greater populations they can support. For this he recommends rolling a certain sized die for each hex according to that hexes resource and what's nearby. (page 59 - Ancient Wargaming)

Cities of certain sizes should have certain populations. He uses degrees of ten and a number of D6's based on the type. A town has an order of 1,000 times the number of d6 rolled, with the size of the town calibrated by a number of d6's ranging from 1 for small to 6 for very large. Therefore, an average town would have 3d6 x 1000 people. (page 60 - Ancient Wargaming)

Once you have the town population size you can determine the maximum number of levies annually that can be pressed into military service. He recommends about 10% normally or 20% in a crisis. (Page 92 - Ancient Wargaming) Additionally, the town is supported by resource units that can be produced measured in Gold Crowns, usually a few hundred for each type of resource. (Page 92 - Ancient Wargaming)

These gold crowns can be spent to feed armies, the population, maintain roads, repair walls, build ships or siegecraft and a number of other things necessary to win at war on a strategic scale. Units each require a number of Gold Crowns per month to operate. Without resources, or in losing them, you threaten that economic output and martial strength of a people. (Page 93-101) Really, this idea of an economic unit of measurement made the whole process much simpler, even if it wasn't Gold Crowns being fed into the mouths of sailors!

He also has rules for how weather and terrain affect movement and even rules for personalities of leaders or random monthly events. (Pages16-17, 67-68, 106, 123)

This is all probably beginning to sound like a Grand Strategy video game like "Crusader Kings" or "Europa Universalis" and it certainly is! But what effect does this have on the wargame of the meeting of armies, and then finally on the roleplaying game of Thieves and Wizards within dungeons seeking treasure?

During the course of the Kriegspiel the weather turned bad for the winter around the 15th of Noillag. The land and bays froze affecting the movement of units and ships. Due to a random event, the available resources supporting a gathering army of allies became severely constrained, and the required support in Gold Crowns to house and feed those armies began to fall through. No expected cinematic moment of the Riders of Rohan simply showing up at dawn here, how could they be fed?

Players suddenly faced running out of food and resources within a week, and this on top of intrigues within and a hostile player seeking to bring about their demise without.

None of those things were pre-scripted or planned. Just like old school tabletop roleplaying games, this "playing at the world" approach to the map allowed for these dramas to arise naturally. Sometimes unexpected events would shatter player’s plans, or accelerate and enable them. Either way, it wasn't me scripting events and trying to provide narrative katharsis, but rather a living world with realistic rules presenting challenges that smart people were interacting with to overcome. Everything for me felt alive and realistic. When epic moments happened, and they did, they felt far more tangible and satisfying.

Some of the conventions I used to put the game together

The entire game was for participants already familiar with our open table, Gygaxian campaign milieu, classical OD&D game. Those that signed up would participate in a "play-by-post" campaign on our play club server. The whole group would recieve one report and then each player representing a faction would recieve their own tailored report weekly. Each week, based on that report, they could issue an order. I'd use the math in the game systems and look at all the orders to decide the outcome, actually playing through combats solo. Then the report for the next week would update them on results and so on. I planned to run this for about 6 weeks of play. Time would pass 1 for 1 in the real world between orders and events would occur during the week based on distance, rate and time.

(Simultaneously in this world two other Referees were running games on the same calendar, in the same world, in different places! But that’s a story for another time.)

I needed to pull from some OD&D supplements and our own retro-clone for some things like naval battles, underwater combat and aerial combat, and I also used two modules I will include at the end as they were already part of the campaign setting, but for the rest I had two primary documents

- Tony Bath's Ancient Wargaming by John Curry - Strategic scale gameplay. For the setup of the maps, towns, resources, personalities, random events, movement of armies, weather and terrain I used Ancient Wargaming.

- Chainmail - Tactical scale gameplay. For tactical battles between units, I used Chainmail 3rd Edition, 2nd printing by TSR - Gary Gyax and Jeff Perren.

How I set the game up

I began by issuing a general guideline for how the game worked and the fiction of the world. I used the "5 W" format for this "Who, what, when, where, why, how." I then gave a group wide, cryptic "newspaper" as Tony Bath calls it, in the group chat. The reports of bards and criers and such about what was happening known to most.

To each faction I gave one long "Operations Order" using the SMESC format ("Situation, Mission, Execution"...etc..) Then I gave them their first weekly report. Operations orders, reports and clarifications I did via private messaging with each faction.

To make it more of a "game" and since I ran it for a defined period, I gave each of them a "end state" in their Operations Order that would be their "win state." These were assymetric, sometimes smaller factions might need to achieve something ambitious, other factions might want to keep the status quo etc. The pathway to accomplish these goals would also vary and factions had varying strengths and weaknesses.

They then would ask for clarifications on things. Based on the clarification they'd issue a single order of about a paragraph or two. It could be to any number of their units, personalities engaged in courtly intrigues, the sending of messages etc. Anything that made sense. If it wasn't covered in the rules I'd use the "open system" and simply make a ruling, almost never using dice rolls or making up rules but just determining outcomes. If there was a rule, I’d use it. Usually if it makes sense in the open system I just say "yes" if a rule doesn’t cover it. If there's risk involved or it's a "no" I'd define and clarify that with the player more (Free Kriegspiel model).

Once they were happy with the clarity of the fiction and issued their order I'd look at all the orders and do the math of the weather for the next week, the movement of non player character elements and the movements of armies. If an army met in potential combat I'd notify the players involved and resolve it. They would not recieve a report of the battle by rider until their next weekly report. I kept track of all of this on a calendar for time. If an event occured before a report was recieved I'd note that etc.

How the game turned out - Musings and feelings on it

This game style can burn a Referee out!

I had a great time with this, but it turned out to be a lot more work than I had expected.

I love Chainmail

I actually adore Chainmail, and can really see how it's entirely sufficient for use with Original D&D on it's own. This tiny little game system covers all sorts of things and leads to a really fair, interesting, fast and heroic game. Dislike all the whiffing you do on a D20 back and forth to hit each other in D&D? Not a problem in Chainmail! And that's something I think people really have the wrong impression of so here's a spicy take: Chainmail is simpler to use than D&D. You just use the charts, chuck some D6's and find out what happens really fast. It's hard to imagine a faster, easier mass combat system that at the same time manages so many details too. We got to do some jousts, wizard duels and all sorts of funny things packed into this tiny book.

Tony Bath's Ancient Wargaming seems perfectly compatible with Chainmail and Original D&D.

The distances used are about the same, the references to various units are very similar, the size of regiments are the same. I didn't use them but many of the tactical rules are identical. I think it was a good call to use Ancient Wargaming for the strategic scale of Original D&D.

Lessons I learned

If I were to run a "Braunstein" or "Free Kriegspiel" of a strategic scale war for Original D&D again, here are some things I would do differently.

Take the time to clearly develop the game in advance

By not doing this, players often needed clarification of situations, which from what I understand is perfectly normal in a Kriegspiel. However, sometimes players would issue very long or comprehensive orders to cover me being vague or missing important details. The worst outcome is when a player doesn’t understand the situation and makes decisions, later to say "That's not what I thought was going on?"

Whenever this is due to them not understanding the rules or guidelines that is one thing, but it's an awful feeling when this occurs because I failed to provide guidelines or rules.

I think this kind of game deserves a good layer of preparation and perhaps a robust gazateer for everyone involved to be on the same page at the beginning, if not a pre-game chat about expectations and scope etc.

Limit the number of fantastic elements

I didn't know it but we bit off way more than is probably typical for a game of Chainmail. Multiple wizards, flying fantasy creatures, siegecraft, sea battles, aerial combat, Balrogs and Dragons...it was a lot. It still worked, but it made for a lot of work. Some of this greatly unbalanced the game and with fantasy or hero units often the game simply came down to an epic 2d6 roll-off between two or more hero types. While that was dramatic, players who either had more conventional forces or made intricate plans for the wargame were left sidelined.

In the future, I would probably allow no more than one magic sword per faction, maybe 1-2 heroes, and 1-2 fantasy units, even on a strategic scale.

Use of a VTT or shared battle map / sand table

Eventually I started using Roll20 to resolve combats and roll dice. Roll20 is really helpful because anyone can log on even if I'm not running the game and look at the log or roll dice if needed. I was also able to not clutter up the chat by having all the combat play out on the VTT. Roll20 has a hex map feature which I needed when we started doing aerial and naval warfare and it was just more satisfying to use when gaming the combat solo. I would imagine if someone had the means actually having a sandtable or diorama would be even more fun, but not having that or playing online using a VTT helped a lot.

Limit orders and scope or limit the time of play

This turned out to be quite a lot more work than I expected having 5 players. I had imagined simply issuing a report to each, one overall "newspaper", clarifying the report and recieving one simple order in return and processing them, then repeating that process. As things became more dire, complex and large in scale this began to breakdown and toward the end it became nearly a live chat, 25% of which was me clarifying details of which there were A LOT.

By the end of the campaign I needed to accelerate things, which the players were kind enough to accomodate. We sped up past 1:1 time and moved ahead once orders were resolved. I think if playing with friends on a long weekend (for those who can still do that sort of thing) you could have a really epic wargame with friends on a strategic scale that could do this anyway.

For someone busy like me, I think it would be best to clearly define things in the beginning, stick to the game, and have simpler orders and a more limited scope in the future.

Conclusions

I can't imagine a better way to start a campaign now. I know I'm not the only one that has done this, but if you have the time and are going for a big, grand, living world, with realism and simulation in it (the way we who play in our “Otherworld” OD&D campaign like it), what better way than to have a strategy game with friends decide what the world looks like? Starting with a strategic wargame and then dungeon crawling in the aftermath is incredible.

This is a really ambitious form of gameplay. The Referee could also use a simpler execution and system, one in fact is mentioned in Ancient Wargaming. (page 204 - Ancient Wargaming).

Obviously, should your Original Dungeons and Dragons campaign arise to 9th level, I could see "Ancient Wargaming" being really useful as well for providing details about things like the conditions of roads, infrastracture and adding all kinds of realism.

I highly recommend above all Tony Bath's Ancient Wargaming - by John Curry for tools and ideas for strategic level gameplay for OD&D and other grand campaigns, and see below for additional resources I found useful.

And if you run a classical game with an ambitious grand campaign scope, how do you depict or resolve strategic scale concerns?

Thank you to the players willing to endure this experimentation!

People and groups who were helpful:

Clerics wear Ringmail - https://clericswearringmail.blogspot.com/

Rick Stump “Don’t Split the Party” - https://harbingergames.blogspot.com/ and the fine people at the “Don’t Split the Pary” Discord (Best Discord server ever)

The members of the Mythic Mountains Tabletop club, especially the players in the game

Joy of Wargaming “Chainmail on Campaign” -

Useful resources:

Tony Bath’s Ancient Wargaming by John Curry - https://www.amazon.com/Tony-Baths-Ancient-Wargaming-Including-ebook/dp/B01N2HI27I

Chainmail 3rd Edition, 2nd Printing by Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren - Available on eBay and other 3rd party sellers

Resources used in addition to those:

Swords & Wizardry Complete: Revised by Mythmere Games - https://www.mythmeregames.com/collections/swords-wizardry?srsltid=AfmBOooi4waBNvrqS7I26PinC25g38JqS_En8PKy5Itu8ML6sQLZAqHo

Adventurer Conqueror King Imperial Imprint - https://autarch.co/

Echoes from Fomalhaut #9 - The Gates of Sorrow - https://emdt.bigcartel.com/product/echoes-from-fomalhaut-09-beyond-the-gates-of-sorrow

The Isle of Pyade - Bat in the Attic - https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/470159/the-isle-of-pyade

I'll share our experiments where we feel that the promise of Folk RPG Gaming was fulfilled amd I'll provide some of my opinions in defense of this being the case.

What is Shadowdark?

Shadowdark has an introduction in the beginning of the book which is very succinct and accurate.

It's a modern adventure game, in the spirit of games like “Basic and Expert Dungeons and Dragons” and many of the modern OSR games from that design school like “Knave” and “Lamentations of the Flame Princess”, however it uses modern mechanics including those familiar to players of the current edition of Dungeons and Dragons. It also borrows from other inspirations like “Dungeon Crawl Classics” and “Index Card RPG”.

It's ethos is: fast, dangerous, simple. It is compellingly those things in play. It's fun. It works right out of the book. In a single book someone has everything they need for endless role-playing adventures from character options and rules, to game procedures, to Gamemaster tools and advice. The advice in it is superb. It's one of the most “complete” RPGs I've ever seen.

Shadowdark RPG released in February 28, 2023. This year it swept the Ennie Awards, taking four titles including “Best Game.” The Kickstarter was immensely successful gathering $1.3 Million dollars and the game was even mentioned in Forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/robwieland/2023/03/16/shadowdark-looks-back-at-dungeon-crawls-with-an-eye-to-the-future/

It's received praise and partnership from most of the online “D&Dtubers”, Old school gamers are playing Shadowdark, such as Erik Tenkar and JoetheLawyer. New school gamers and those who usually focus on modern RPGs such as “Sly Flourish” enjoy it too.

Best of all, families are playing Shadowdark together.

Word is spreading, people are buying it and playing it with friends and family. It has absolutely taken over at conventions and is played by just about everyone who has stepped a foot beyond brand D&D or Pathfinder.

The story of Shadowdark is likely known to you if you are reading this blog. In short, Shadowdark provides the game-play that 5e failed to. It's mechanics are old school in some ways, the game is fast, improvisational, and makes you feel like you are playing D&D.

I don't think it's possible to really explain what Shadowdark is all about, the impact it has had and will have, without talking about the phenomenon around it and it's creator. This phenomenon is not just about rules in a book. This is both something critics of Shadowdark don't understand, and some are reflexively opposed to.

When Shadowdark entered Kickstarter and the first draft of the completed rules were released to backers, we saw it's potential in the Mythic Mountains RPG play club and put it to the table.

I suspected this could provide the energy and character flavor modern gamers wanted with the simplicity and archetypal quality of B/X D&D. What's more, it's success was working in the way a Folk RPG game could, in the way we would hope it would.

With the help of my friends in the play club, we ran several experiments.

Can it fulfill the hopes of what 5e failed to do? Can it be the D&D of the Folk RPG Hobby for years to come? Can it be simultaneously what is fun in modern D&D and classical D&D?

The answer was “yes” to all of the above.

You can see our entire Shadowdark actual play playlist here:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3c4xRmyQ_SJlzBBDNh4cwSOhroOQfDCz&si=ZuJZnBExSjfiXZw0

The Five Shadowdark Experiments

We arranged four experiments: “as intended”, a “classic” adventure, a “modern” adventure and a home-brew campaign.

The “As Intended Experiment” - “Cursed Scroll 3 – Midnight Sun”

I read through the rules and used the module “Midnight Sun” by Arcane library. We pumped up some Nordic Folk Metal, put our terrible Viking accents on, and really went wild in the frozen north. The Vikings were cast from the mountains by ornery Dwerg, had riddle tests with ghosts and mystics, offered sacrifices to the gods, battled frost giants and spilled the blood of their foes in haunted caves.

I had so much fun. I think this is an ideal way to start with Shadowdark too. The Cursed Scrolls really reveal how this game can be used beyond the core rules, because they suggest different and unique classes and features which might not work in just any game or setting, and are different from the core book. In my opinion, the Cursed Scrolls really reveal the truth of Shadowdark. While Shadowdark from the book is great, it can be the D&D anyone needs it to be with very little work.

Some of the players were die hard OSR gamers, others were modern gamers coming from Pathfinder or 5^th Edition. They seemed to sense that they weren't superheroes and would need to work together, and employ the use of their other vikings aboard their longship. The game pretty well worked for everyone, being familiar to both old school and new school RPG gamers.

Using “Midnight Sun” and casually approaching the rules I certainly made some mistakes, but they really didn't manage to break the game. The whole thing just worked dang well and was incredibly fun.

The “Classical Experiment” - “B3 – Palace of the Silver Princess”

The question is often asked if Shadowdark can run classic content. The simple answer is just “yes.” Divide the treasure by ten and you don't need to change much else.

We used the Jean Wells original “orange cover” version of “B3: Palace of the Silver Princess”. Most of the players were dedicated, hard core, old school gamers who favored classical systems and retro-clones. This version of the module doesn't just have the dungeon, but a massive sandbox. To really put things to the test, I made the players foreigners to the forsaken, monster-infested lands of Gulluvia and put them at the opposite side of the sandbox from the dungeon!

In the course of our adventures, the characters would struggle to find the Palace among the dark politics of the region and the deadly wilderness, try to steal a dragon's egg, find an ancient and mad Dwarf from the before times and finally lay to rest the secret of the Silver Princess (and unwittingly unleash it's curse probably on all of Mystara.)

I adored this short campaign as well. It stands in my mind as one of my favorite classic adventures I've ever ran and Shadowdark was part of that. However, here we started to run into some problems and while some were my mistakes, I can see how Shadowdark is limited to the degree it can be stretched to fit everything, and a few things confused me when I tried employing rules straight from the book.

Overland travel – The adventurers were nearly completely wiped out several times attempting to traverse a monster infested forest to find the dungeon. I'm glad we got to witness this difficulty as it really put the systems in Shadowdark to the test. Some of this was caused by my own mistakes, and it's worth noting the author released alternate wilderness exploration rules that would later resolve most of these difficulties. From the version of the book I had at the time, characters could only carry a certain number of torches and food. Characters would have around ten total slots and this included much of their items, then 3 rations would be one slot and 1 torch would be a slot.

Shadowdark is merciless when the lights go out. It was fitting for the setting of that module how I read it too, the wilderness and the dungeon were horrifying, and Shadowdark was a dangerous game! Therefore, I employed the rules for Shadowdark when the lights are out. Encounters are constant and deadly in those circumstances. I did not allow the benefits of rest if they didn't have a campfire or other safe arrangement for sleep. The rules actually suggest you can create a campfire with 3 torches but that's 3 inventory slots!

I eventually bent the rules to resemble something closer to what the author would create later with alternate hex-crawling. They could spend a full watch during the day that could have been spent traveling gathering food or firewood for the campfire. There was a chance they could fail at this however and it slowed them down.

The book doesn't have mounts, though they exist in some of the Cursed Scroll Zines. I had seen my game of OSE fall apart with mounts so I was hardly concerned about people needing to use their feet. The sandbox for the Orange Cover B3 could have probably used them though. It took something like 2 weeks to travel to make it to the dungeon from the nearest settlement they could find.

The players added to the high body count with a bit of bloodlust, which would eventually be tempered after a while when the body count rose high enough.

Either way traveling through wildernesses designed for B/X modules with weeks of travel was brutal. I also provided mules in the settlement (not included in Shadowdark) to help carry things, but that complicated the need to run away during encounters. One of the open world encounters when they were just trying to find their way back to a settlement after getting separated and lost was “5 velociraptors” which were faster than the players and I rolled a low reaction roll for (hostile). While you should usually be able to get away or even have positive encounters sometimes (we did during the Cursed Scroll campaign), sometimes the rules can come together to be really punishing.

This led them to return to a settlement multiple times which led to...

Carousing

Another of Shadowdark's core mechanics is something which keeps the focus on adventuring.

In Shadowdark, the suggested amount of gold is 1/10^th that of B/X and items are more expensive. When you do find treasure, the game suggests you blow it in town, offering XP rewards and even things like magic items and trusted companions for lavishing your treasures on the wayfaring inn during partying and a riotous debauch.

This had an odd effect. The adventure eventually began to resemble multiple failed attempts at penetrate a monster infested forest, with the goal becoming returning to the Inn to brag and lie about it and blow money they found on monsters. I tried to generate treasure “by the book” which suggests a 50% chance of monsters dropping or having treasure nearby. It's simple, but it turned into a game of less scope on accident, and they began to “grind levels” through this strange two part loop. It wasn't quite like the game-play loop of classic D&D, which although it sounds similar, leads to adventure sites, treasure hoards and points of interest rather than a video game like cycle of hitting monsters enough to get coins and using the coins to get levels.

Many people in the Shadowdark community, including Kelsey herself, were helpful in guiding me to understanding how the carousing system and wilderness travel should be used. But I present these mistakes here to note something that naturally arose from someone just reading the book and trying to employ them.

It isn't game breaking, but to avoid the less interesting adventure loop our players found themselves in, there are some things that aren't apparent from the book that seem important for wilderness travel. For one, I'd recommend the new “alternate hex crawling” rules or the rules coming in the new Cursed Scroll Zine 4.

Those rules are balanced and have been play tested to account for things like needing a campfire and food while having limited inventory slots. Next, I'd recommend more complex options than those presented in the book for items and rules covering large hex-crawls, such as mounts and beasts of burden, which are included in Cursed Scroll Zine 2, and are easily added to the game from classical and modern OSR materials which are compatible.

Lastly I'd note that it seems to me that modern OSR adventure games simply have a different approach to wilderness exploration than classic games.

I observed this somewhat in our “two sandbox” experiment of long-form classic D&D campaigns. Classic games will often have long tracks of land, impassable features going across whole hexes and the majority of hexes have no contents. My observation is this is because classic games like Original D&D and B/X depend on the game procedures to produce the game, rather than the adventure design and content. Modern OSR adventures seem to work to include interesting things and to make choices with in as many hexes as it can fit.

And this leads to…

Dungeons

I found this also to be the case with dungeons. We noticed when running “B4: The Lost City” using OSE as well as “B1: In Search of the Unknown” and other classic dungeon modules, that there are several long passages, sometimes more than 100 feet, that simply terminate at a dead end or no meaningful choice to make.

In modern OSR dungeons this seems to be bad design. Every turn and corridor is kept tighter and shorter, and rooms either pace or lead to the next choice or feature. In my blog articles I often talk about “character facing” vs. “world facing” design, and how classical games are “world facing” while modern games are “character facing.” Modern OSR games sometimes seem to me “adventure facing” relying on level design and adventure content for the fun of the game.

This focus on actionable and interesting content is sometimes mistakenly thought of as an objective improvement by those who misunderstand classic content, when in truth, they are simply different. Long corridors terminating in dead ends, multiple intersections with only the choice of “do we go left or right” and the majority of rooms simply being empty was nail-biting when we employed retro-clones of the classic games, which required encumbrance tracking and measuring distance and time. This lead to moments where players were able to see the entire dungeon as a battlefield or chess board they were playing against a foe, rather than a theme park of points of interest and conversational choices. There were moments where they had fled back onto their previous position and into monsters exhausted and nearly out of light because they failed to map well and even a moment where they made it to the end of a long corridor only to have their torchlight go out and hear the sounds of monsters slavering for them in the darkness.

Where the modern OSR can sometimes feel like a conversation game of interesting choices and consequences, the classic game is more like a wargame with pieces on a board and rules where one can win or lose.

Here I made perhaps my biggest mistake with Shadowdark, and it amounts to not trusting the system. Initially when they made it to the Palace of the Silver Princess I used time as in B/X instead of allowing the Crawling Rounds to take place. We found this didn't work, but when we switched to how the rules describe a Crawling Round, which is abstracted and simply based on everyone getting to act, things in Shadowdark worked as advertised, that is it was fast. Much faster than B/X.

Shadowdark made very clear that this classical dungeon design was an odd fit. Because turns were abstracted and distances weren't measured, long corridors terminating in dead ends, empty rooms and lots of branching paths not leading to major checkpoints from this classic module made for dungeon content with no game-play. This didn't make it impossible to run this classic dungeon, but there were aspects of the dungeon design that Shadowdark couldn't access and felt vestigial.

Many people run classic dungeons in this way even when using classic systems anyway, essentially ignoring encumbrance and time to focus on the next event or choice in the dungeon.

In most ways, things that might seem very different from a Classic D&D game to Shadowdark didn't yield differences for us in game-play. The swinginess of combat comes out to be about the same as B/X actually in lethality, but is entertaining and wild and gives players more “buttons” to push. Many spells can be cast, but they can be easily lost for the day. HP can be restored with rest, but a character can be easily slain. The game-play felt like old school D&D for players that loved old school D&D.

However, Shadowdark is not a classic RPG. It's a modern one. Important aspects of game-play change when they are abstracted in favor of speed and simplicity. Shadowdark is simply not a substitute for your favorite game if you are already happy, though it may have amalgamated some of its elements. It’s not intended to be classic D&D and it won’t replace it. This is one of the things that critics of Shadowdark don't understand, the game and it's designer, never intended to make the next best version of B/X. If you prefer Old School Essentials, Basic Fantasy or Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, it's not likely that Shadowdark will offer you something better than what you already like.

At the same time, if you are the sort of person that uses either a Classic D&D game, retro-clone or a modern game with classical elements in a looser and abstracted fashion and would prefer the more concrete and specific elements that can make the game slower and more deliberative get out of the way in favor of speed, and just want to get to the next cool thing in the dungeon to present to players, Shadowdark runs classic content with aplomb.

The “Heroic” experiment

I had not ran Dungeons and Dragons 5e or any sort of modern D&D for about a year and a half. I suspected that while Shadowdark wasn't intended for this purpose, that it would fulfill what people wanted from modern D&D better with very few changes.

I created a single page of tweaks which aren't much different than what people are used to. In hindsight you could probably have a heroic game of Shadowdark just if you use pulp mode. (An optional mode given in the Shadowdark text to tweak the game experience. Pulp mode awards an advantage token to players which can make the game more heroic.)

We used a modern module from Troll Lord Games called “The Flame of Lornedain” from the adventure tome “City of Brass” which sees the heroes rescuing townspeople and facing an evil villain in a story rather than simply extracting gold.

This worked flawlessly in my opinion. In every sense the game provided the heroism of 5e. Additionally, by using the https://shadowdarklings.net/ website and allowing all of the character options, it put the number of character options in 5e to shame. We had a lizard wizard, a kobold ranger, a towering half-orc brute warrior, an actual tree witch called “Log” with a pet bird. If you want to have a wild panoply, character extravaganza as in 5e culture in Shadowdark, you absolutely can with the current professionally designed third party materials. Shadowdarklings.net is like a simplified D&D Beyond also.

Not only did the play experience feel cinematic, heroic and story oriented, but it was fast. For a game that seeks to be heroic and cinematic, 5e utterly fails due to the combat system. Shadowdark was lightning fast even when tested at level 10 with powerful abilities and large pools of dice between characters and opponents.

When pulp mode is employed and the characters have some hit points, it provides the tension of 5e characters around level 3 or so, something I have always considered “the goldilocks zone” of 5e. They don't believe their characters will be slain in a meaningless way and modern players invest in the character's development, and yet it still felt dangerous and thrilling.

Shadowdark solves all of 5e's mechanical combat problems without stripping interesting options for characters when using the current range of expanded content from Cursed Scroll zines and third party designers. It takes some bold moves from a modern perspective by creating restrictions and pushing back on endless options, and it is true that you can't “build” your character in Shadowdark. Progression is determined randomly and initial features have a greater impact on the character's power than stats. Shadowdark refuses to allow for min-maxing, or anything that slows the game down. You can only take one action and move once. Numbers have a tighter bounded accuracy than in 5e, and should usually never be above a +4.

Having read through “Worlds without number” and ran “Five Torches Deep”, as well as many other “O5R” hybrid type games, I feel I can say that Shadowdark has done the best job of capturing the desires of 5e players and OSR referees in the same game.

Shadowdark was never intended to replace 5e or act as a surrogate for simpler, faster, epic fantasy gaming. But it can. I believe it can replace the social phenomenon that was 5e, but mechanically it’s not that game from the book. It will never satisfy those who enjoy the system mastery of Pathfinder or 5e and doesn't seek to. It does require the use of the optional “pulp” mode, and some beefier characters.

Additionally, Gamemasters that wish to run a “modern” or “heroic” style of Shadowdark will need to make an adventure game into a modern RPG by looking at the carousing and progression systems and tweaking them in some way.

I found this could be done on a single sheet of paper however and it worked with no problems.

For those interested here are the rules I used to make Shadowdark heroic:

https://mythicm.itch.io/herodark

The “Modern” Experiment

I suspect that most of the D&D played in the world still resides in the basement. Local friends and family who come up with their own worlds and ideas and who loosely interpret rules to have a good time. Every table is wildly different and the online internet conversation, and certainly the brand hobby culture, cannot show what D&D is really like from table to table, or really any table because the game actually happens at the table, not in brands or blogs.

Our final experiment was a group of longtime friends who have played D&D together for years, and a Dungeon Master with a wildly creative homebrew world.

Initially this experiment did poorly because the group was not used to old school mechanics. A TPK, then nearly another TPK. We adjusted the hit points, but then play settled into role-playing, exploration and investigation. The group knew combat could be deadly and learned. Really, this was the game-play that we had sought when we played together for years anyway trying to use 5e, it was never a combat heavy group and the bolting on of a crunchy, mechanics heavy skirmish game to our story always felt strange. While getting out of the way, Shadowdark still felt like D&D and eventually we felt powerful enough to feel cool and do cool stuff.

This to me reveals another important thing about ShadowDark: there is a learning barrier for people coming from modern RPGs, similar to other OSR games. This barrier can easily be overcome, but I see these experiences quite often on Facebook, Reddit and Discord where new ShadowDark GMs find the experience of losing characters and having no apparent story to not be fun.

I asked Jake to change the game in this case because the setting and game-play expectations were more about role-play and investigation than danger and combat. I asked him to do a couple of things similar to our heroic game, start with max hit points, and allow us to flee if combat was lethal, as well as to always use the reaction roll and distance mechanics for encounters.

This worked. Jake used the reaction system for strange, homebrew and handcrafted monsters balanced from the ShadowDark book and encounters were still lethal and scary, but we could run. If we perished, it was really our own fault. We did flee several times, sometimes we pushed our luck and got close to death, at all times when exploring the Jake's world I was scared and thrilled.

Once we got past the initial hump of getting used to OSR mechanics, the game really sang. It mainly did this in two ways. For one, the mechanics were abstract and concept based enough to be so fast and minimal as a player that they faded into the background. There was nothing on the character sheet to stare at or use mostly, and we found ourselves much more immersed in Jake’s handcrafted, weird and creative world.

At the same time however, the mechanics that did exist were fun to use and at the discretion of the player, unlike the OSR games we play where you sometimes have to wonder why you even have a character sheet.

One of the players who was primarily a 5e player who enjoyed class features in 5e was a goblin wizard who could cast magic missile with advantage, and had a background as a wolf cultist. The character had enough details to fit on an index card and yet at the same time the former 5e player constantly had interesting things about their character to explore or use. A major feature of the campaign for us became exploring the characters connection to a lost cult and seeking magical knowledge.

Both the Gamemaster and this player deepened the interesting features of the character by things arising in the world, particularly magic items and objects, and relationships with NPCs. The world had became the player's character sheet naturally without the brutal and dizzying starting point of a level 1 B/X character with almost nothing to begin with. Using magic missile with advantage did not make the character powerful in every respect, and they knew well their hit points were low, and yet using that ability was fun and satisfying.

To have a mechancally interesting character with reliable abilities is something absent in the mechanics of B/X D&D. While interesting characters can exist in the shared fiction the group comes up with in those classical games, ShadowDark captures this excitement about characters without making them invincible in the buttons players can push in the game, especially if your table allows third party content as mentioned in the heroic experiment.

Grand scope – Adventurer Conqueror King.

The last two experiments mentioned above are not “intended” game-play for Shadowdark, but I don't think that matters. I think people will take Shadowdark and make it what 5e should have been, and it will work great.

In the spirit of that, I imagine a 5^th experiment. Can Shadowdark house a grand campaign?

The creator of Shadowdark has several time and explicitly stated this is not the goal of Shadowdark. The play test of Shadowdark campaigns went from level 1 to 10 (max level) and lasted a year. This is much more ambitious than most 5e campaigns which, in my experience, struggle to not fall apart by level 5 or so around month 4.

But what if we want more? What if we run an open table of Shadowdark the way the progenitors of the hobby ran the game.

You can see that magic of this style of game I discovered in my previous article. It is a game like no other and I simply suggest reading that article to discover why.

But did you know that Shadowdark itself was forged in just this fashion?

https://www.thearcanelibrary.com/blogs/shadowdark-blog/open-table-how-the-creators-of-d-d-ran-their-games?srsltid=AfmBOoqpGuC1x2RTHJc0ppb7tdhr-E8WCeZ_Jnxo3JFcVA1qP0Mq7orT

It seems the creator of Shadowdark discovered this truth as she was creating this game. But what happens when you have characters that have made it to 10^th level but you have one of these permanent, decades long lasting worlds?

And here, I have no answers. I was not able to complete or test the fifth experiment due to other projects. Of course, groups could simply enjoy years of adventuring and retire adventurers when they get to level 10 with near endless fun.

I do have a theory however. I suspect that the answer to Old School Essentials, Knave, B/X, Lamentations of the Flame Princess and other games that share the “B/X strand of DNA” as I call it, all achieving grand scope with decades of play will be thanks to Adventurer Conqueror King, especially the new Imperial Reprint which collects and codifies many rules which are largely B/X compatible in terms of things like economics and scale of adventuring for high level play beyond dungeon delving. Things like sailing voyages, establishing a new government, securing and building a stronghold, leading an army to war, and the vagaries of establishing a Thieves Guild and what activities it might get up to:

The point isn’t to advertise ACKS, and this “fifth experiment” sits firmly in theory for me, but I think it’s the next step for these “B/X” DNA strand games we love. Have you, reader, had a “grand scope” Shadowdark campaign lasting years of play and including elements beyond just the scope of adventuring that is sanctuaries, wilderness exploration and dungeons? What did you use? Something large like RuneQuest, Harnworld or ACKs? Or something of your own design? Let me know in the comments.

In summary

One woman managed to undo the hegemony of the brand. With help of course, built upon the work before of course, but more than any game so far.

Kelsey did something you weren't supposed to do as an indie designer; she was endlessly kind and focused on gaming, with everyone, without exception. Kelsey managed to unite the old and the new not just in a game, but to make a safe gaming community for both grognards and young people. Sure, grognards played with young people and vice versa before, but never like this.

Kelsey managed to heal the rift between old and new. WOTC could have done this a decade ago, but at the crucial moment, they decided not to, and that curse would fester in that corporation to become the monster we know it is today. It's not just about mechanics. Shadowdark possesses the energy that has made younger people excited about 5e with the design principles that makes the OSR full of tinkerers and Game Masters.

Grassroots community building, built on a welcoming and universal focus on gaming can and does prevail. Gaming brings together, heals, unites. A darkness, I think, is passing.

It's true that there's really nothing new in Shadowdark, though it's a finely crafted amalgam of many things. If this weren't the case and it had some kind of central, exotic gimmick (the torch timer was not central to the game in my experience), it wouldn't have been able to accomplish what it did.

It doesn't matter what happens with the Shadowdark community etc. beyond this point because the cat is out of the bag. Anyone can make D&D, it belongs to everyone.

No one needs to pay for D&D, it's a folk art. But if you make something cool, people will buy cool stuff from you.

The Folk RPG Hobby has won.

References and links

“Shadowdark RPG” and the “Cursed Scroll Zines” are owned by The Arcane Library, LLC. Purchase them here!

https://www.thearcanelibrary.com/pages/shadowdark?srsltid=AfmBOopUnh-ezY8YG-U6m0xpP--1iKtUSxqyAfzwq6e_hLf1jno09k-U

"City of Brass” by Frog God Games

https://www.froggodgames.com/products/18135?srsltid=AfmBOoodzQtx11MzJ09-F8lYamCK1bhaZwearfVHLEbiNoda8UU7Pka0

Classic TSR Modules such as “B4: Palace of the Silver Princess” may be purchased used on eBay or at Noble Knight Games:

https://www.nobleknight.com/

The Evils of Illmire - by Spellsword

https://www.spellsword.net/posts/the-evils-of-illmire-mini-mega-hex-crawl-adventure

The Incandescent Grottoes - by Necrotic Gnome

https://necroticgnome.com/products/the-incandescent-grottoes

This blog and the linked actual play videos are independent and owned by Mythic Mountains RPG, any references or use of Shadowdark RPG are used under the Shadowdark RPG Third Party License and are not affiliated with The Arcane Library LLC. Shadowdark RPG © 2023 The Arcane Library, LLC.

I want to note at the beginning that I'm aware I've "discovered" nothing here, and that many gamers have kept this style of play alive through the decades, others have enjoyed it for many years. I also understand these are just the beginning steps into a wider world. Some of you I have since met, others I'd like to meet. Let me know in the comments your experiences with this style of play!

I contend that there are roughly 2 Old School Renaissances:

• An OSR based on design principles.

• An OSR based on keeping the genius of old games alive.

Within that division lay an even deeper struggle.

The difference between two D&D DNA strands - Basic and Advanced.

The difference between the two primordial playstyles: Wargames vs. Funny Voices.

The eternal struggle of Law vs. Chaos.

This is a detailed report of my journey between both alignments in the OSR, and how I went from thinking lots of rules stink, to thinking Original D&D and AD&D might be the best roleplaying games ever made.

Definitions

Before I begin, I'll be using some terms. While some will disagree with these definitions, here are mine:

OSR (The Old School Renaissance) - Generally speaking, when I say the OSR I mean any game at all that pulls significantly from the design of D&D prior to 1983 when the "elusive shift" pivoted the game towards story and away from simulation and open adventure.

This has become nearly meaningless, means like 10 different things to 100 different major sub-factions of this niche sub-genre of tabletop roleplaying, and people fight over it constantly. Aligned with Chaos as I am, I consider this a feature! Especially that no one is in charge and no one is allowed to define it.

The best definition in my opinion is the spectrum described in the document "Principia Apocrypha":

OSR games may use some of these principles, only a few of them, or may doggedly adhere to the majority of the very mechanics themselves from the original games.

Most of the games considered "OSR" today come from what I call the "B/X strand of DNA”. They either slightly change the rules or presenation of B/X, or are based in it's assumptions. Within these are the classic games themselves like B/X and BECMI, retroclones like Basic Fantasy RPG and Old School Essentials, and ‘post’ the beginnings of the OSR, more free from adherence to the old rules, games like; Mork Borg, Knave, Cairn and Shadowdark.

Games that arise from either Original D&D or Advanced D&D are far more rare.

Adventure Gaming - I define Adventure Games as any pencil and paper tabletop game where the goal is to grow in power and wealth through exploration. Not only is play-acting not required in an Adventure game, it's questionable whether or not roleplaying is required.

This has ruffled some feathers that some have an expansive defintion. Perhaps the first time this was used was before "roleplaying game" became common parlance. It was famously used at least four times by Gary Gygax in the 1st Edition Advanced D&D Dungeon Master's Guide to describe the game (though used differently several times even then.)

Some feel that what I will call later a "Classical" game is the only correct use of "Fantasy Adventure Game."

I reject this defintion.

The spirit of Adventure Gaming is replete in the OSR. Classic games, for sure, but also games like Mork Borg, Knave, Shadowdark and Cairn. In some ways, these "Modern Adventure Games" really strip apart every other part of the game except the adventure game part.

Sometimes I like to say that the spirit and goal of these games ended with Tom Moldvay's advice on page B3 of the Basic Set, desiring to go no further into fully simulating a fantasy world with intricate mechanical differences between poisons or halberds (which was the point of the Basic Set; to teach young pre-teen boys to become big AD&D boys.)

The modern OSR says, "Nah, actually I'm fine staying here on page B3 actually." And it turns out you can have a really amazing hobby that way! It can't be denied that people are having a blast playing Cairn and Mork Borg.

Here I'll note what Mr. Moldvay calls this game; a "Fantasy Adventure Game". Like it or not, people can have an accessible, stripped down version of adventure gaming without being as robust as AD&D.

And either way, it's a term that is commonly used by artists and designers like Kelsey Dionne, Chris McDowall, Ben Milton and Yochai Gal to describe some of the goals of what they make. Adventure gaming then is exploration focused tabletop gaming, whether classic or new, robust or minimalist.

Classical Gaming, aka Gygaxian Campaign Milieu, aka "Classical Adventure Gaming" - This is a playstyle which is very niche, though it has gained popularity in recent years thanks to a vocal minority on Twitter.

The Classical Gaming playstyle is "that playstyle as described by Gary Gyax in the 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide."

If you closely follow all the principles of play in the 1e DMG, everything from naturalism, simulation (by comparison with other games today), 1:1 timekeeping, factions, grand scope, massive open tables, etc. then you are aiming for the incredibly ambitious style of play that is like the tables Gary once ran at his house in the 70's before the coming of the tournament era and the Big Brand Gary and Big Brand D&D.

It is largely accepted by the small minority of people who employ this playstyle that only games with robust simulationism can support this ambitious project, primarily Swords & Wizardry Revised: Complete, Adventurer Conqueror King, Original D&D, but most of all: 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.

This style of play is a very serious one that requires a great deal of work, with very competent and dedicated players. It has far more in common with the scope and ambition of wargaming than modern roleplaying games. There are also very few that have grand 1e AD&D campaigns like this (most who enjoy 1e AD&D do not use this gameplay style).

The Open vs. the Closed System - Defined more carefully here in this video by the awesome "Grumpy Wizard" OSR Blog -

The "open system" is the mechanism originally used in Kriegspiel wargames which simply states that a participant may attempt any action, and the Referee of the wargame may use their good sense to determine the resolution mechanic if not included in the rules, or the resolution itself.

This is related in some ways to the idea of "Rule Zero."

The "closed system" are those rules in a game which form the hard code and physics of the world to be adhered to in the game mechanics. In D&D when in combat you have a certain number of hit points which must be removed by attacks before a character or monster is taken from play. That hard "code" is the "closed system."

Some games rely more on the open system, similar to Arneson's "Free Kriegspeil" of his Braunstein "Blackmoor", other games have robust closed systems, such as Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition.

My shift in alignment

In 2021 I incurred a spinal injury at work. It's been a painful time working to recover, and the full recovery remains in question. From 2022-2024 I filled that time with Tabletop RPG games to help cope, and used the opportunity to really scratch off some bucket list items

At the time I had already been enjoying the OSR. I had a 5e campaign that had been going on for a year and a half and was looking forward to it ending so that I could try my first big OSR experiment, a big damn campaign of an OSR retro-clone.

I had mostly been running Old School Essentials and really enjoyed it, but hadn't put together a dedicated table campaign longer than about 4 months yet. I got the Advanced Fantasy books and constructed an elaborate gazateer with all the house rules I thought I'd like. I did a thorough and careful session zero and hand picked players to recruit among my friends that I thought would be fun to play with. I thought this Old School Essentials campaign would be the mother of all campaigns, D&D as I had always wanted to actually see it played.

To quote the gazateer I made:

"These are adventurers, and they travel from town to town, from

hill and meadow to forsaken ruin seeking fame and glory, and

each of them has their own agenda, a secret and a story they

might tell...

Fortune and fame are not far off from them, but gods they will

never be.”

An adventurer who will spend an appreciable amount of time travelling through monster infested forests to brave adventure sites, who would use their wits, were more like normal people, who could not call upon class features to short circuit the adventure experience, who had no expectation of being the center of the world or a "story", who had the real threat of death dogging their heels, was always my idea of Dungeons and Dragons and not what I had seen in the modern brand controlled game.

I had seen it in our little games of Old School Essentials and Dungeon Crawl Classics. Now we would see it across the better part of a year with a grand scope.

And we did, the campaign lasted for 14 months!

It was absolutely nothing I had hoped it would be.

Now don't get me wrong, I love Old School Essentials and still sing it's praises for certain things, I loved every player that played in that game and I loved the campaign and the ultimate shared story that arose from it.

But it was NOT an old school adventure game about adventurers. It was a slightly better, more grounded version of what I already knew. A story-centric game where elements of the game didn't work out that I had to put a lot of work into to make up for the system not supporting the intended gameplay.

You can see the entire campaign here:

Very early on, while trying out B4 was tremendous fun and taught me a lot about dungeoneering and classic gaming, it was clear some of the players weren't the right match for the game. That's no shade on them, they were just used to previous games and intersected with this game differently. Ultimately, life commitments took them away anyway. Almost 4 other players would join at various poits and then leave. Eventually several new people would join and my new friends would see the story through to it's end 14 months later. Yet another climactic battle against evil forces for the fate of the world, with fewer class features.

While that campaign was sometimes mediocre, it was always worth it because of those players, who I dearly love, both the ones we started with, the ones that would join and leave and the ones we finished with. I looked forward every week to spending time with them regardless of the game, and they really made the whole think incredibly enjoyable.

If I were to compare that 14 month long Old School Essentials campaign just to my 5e days, it would have been a smashing success.

But another campaign was made....

Otherworld - My accidental entry into Classical gameplay

While I worked hard to put together an ambitious "big damn campaign" of Old School Essentials, I also worked on a second side project. My first OSR setting was called "Otherworld." I was inspired by "3 Hearts and 3 Lions" when my first OSR mentors guided me into B/X and Appendix N, and the setting was based in a mythical Celtic Isles. I continued to run Otherworld as a picaresque, "drop in / drop out" affair with little vignettes of play. Sometimes a group of players would stick around for a while but it became somewhat my default OSR setting.

I decided I wanted to try out the original version of D&D. Many of you who are accustomed to Original D&D are going to note some mistakes here right away, but either way, I shall note the parameters of the experiment:

1. Purchase and use Rappan Athuk as my setting for a megadungeon open table game.

2. Use "Swords & Wizardry" a retro-clone of Original D&D.

3. Only humans, only basic classes including Thief.

4. Whenever a rule was unclear, I'd start with clarification from the "3 little brown books" of Original D&D 1974 to see if I could come to understand the underlying principle of the rule. If I needed even more precise information I'd look at the 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide, or the 1st Edition AD&D Monster Manual.

5. We would play the game strictly by the rules.

6. I would employ the game concepts I read about in OD&D and 1e, including time passing 1 for 1 in the game and in the real world, estate, economics, factions, "relatives" (inheritors), hirelings and henchmen creating a pool of characters for players rather than a single avatar, and many other things.

7. The game would be game and challenge centric. It would carry no assumption of a story, nor even adventure itself. Players were allowed to challenge me on rules being used incorrectly, and were expected to know and understand the rules to play.

8. Only those players who could contest with these challenging conditions would continue to play, and it would not be changed. The game would come first, then the world, and players would be allowed to master it and attempt to defeat it on that basis.

This has been the best Dungeons and Dragons of my life. Nay. I think I have not played Dungeons and Dragons until now.

You can see our entire campaign of Rappan Athuk here:

Meanwhile in the Evening Lands -

I poured my heart into prepping for the Evening Lands campaign. A 23 page gazateer, a gargantuan 60 mile by 120 mile hex map on two hex pages, threading around 5 different OSR modules together for location content and probably a dozen more hand crafted locations including settlements, dungeons, and probably another 25 pages of Referee facing notes on the overworld, history, calendar etc.

I used maybe 5 pages of it.

Yes, I had committed the cardinal sin of sandboxing. I prepared the whole sandbox, including elements that should have been a mere paragraph or less, outside the choices of the players and characters.

Skipping ahead, Rappan Athuk on the other hand would see nearly every page used and worn, the ribbon pulled to tatters from use, covered in drink stains and skin oil stains from constant page flipping and reference. Though I hadn't prepared it myself, Rappan Athuk also has around a 60 mile by 120 mile wilderness area, whose sprawling overland includes page entries on factions, sites of interest, rumor tables etc. (That's before you ever even get into the dungeon.) The only parts of the Rappan Athuk book that haven't seen use are the lower levels of the dungeon which the author Bill Webb assures me we have screwed up the game if they ever survive to see it.

So what was the difference that saw a game world come alive and another be disused?

NOTE: The readers of this blog article, especially those who are enthusiastic about Old School Essentials or one of the nearly endless B/X clones or the original game as I am, will perhaps note some errors that I have conveyed in the B/X gaming experience. However, I have spoken with others who have attempted a large, long term, sprawling B/X campaign and have heard similar experiences. Yes, there are "solutions" to many of the issues you will see arise here. This article doesn't seek to solve those issues, just report that they naturally arose in play.

What went wrong

1. Placing the player and character facing portions of the game front and center (this did the most to ruin the game, and I believe is a key problem in RPGs in general).

Like previous 5e games I had ran, I made the mistake of investing heavily in drawing together the various relationships and backstories of the characters before we started.

Almost every RPG advice source will tell you to place the characters and players first.

They are wrong.

Of course, you should always prioritize real life first, and that includes relationships and caring for people. I feel I have learned this is a seperate and parallel task to being a Classic D&D Referee.

By placing the characters at the center, the gameplay needed to come from the characters instead of the characters going to the gameplay.

For example, I held a "big damn session zero" for everyone to onboard to the setting and thread their characters together. Several who committed ended up not being able to show up. Others who showed up to the session zero would later drop out of the game and players who would later join weren't at the big damn session zero. Several noped out after several sessions joining later. This was a ‘dedicated table’ requiring a session-to-session comittment to play for the game to work well. It sometimes felt jarring to have characters simply ‘vanish’ in the middle of the campaign.

The characters under this arrangement have more to look forward in death than the players. When the players lose a character they lose the most important and interesting part of the game! This makes death suck.

Because there are front loaded story elements and motivations, characters often wanted to pursue their backstory goals (understandable) and then the elements of the world felt like annoying impediments rather than challenges relevant to what they were trying to accomplish. Worse, if one of the players didn't show the main reason to be off somewhere to accomplish their character goal was lost...sometimes sessions into trying to accomplish said goal.

These kinds of concerns meant I needed to redesign things in the world constantly and answer questions continually. All the while the game system provided me no solutions to do so. I found I needed to spend time in preparation before most games away from my family even when I wasn't actually running the game.

Sound familiar? If you have ran modern D&D, it probably does.

2. A rule system that emphasizes the open system rather than containing rules for greater scope gameplay

Coming from 5th Edition D&D where the game system did me no favors at all in conveying the world, I was really enjoying minimalist games with index card sized character sheets and rules that would fit on an A5 end page. I couldn't imagine wanting things to be anymore complicated. As one favorite game designer I love said, "I liked it not because I stopped liking grand stories, but because the rules got out of the way of the story."

Initially, and especially in dungeons, this worked great. I faithfully employed the procedures of Old School Essentials and it reliably produced delightful and unexpected results and I got to be surprised right along with the players.

This worked until around 3rd level when the world became complicated. This open system driven gameplay really began to fall apart once I needed to simulate a fantasy world's economics, factions, weather, etc. consistently.

I found myself making tons of rulings on all sorts of things. Factions, estate, mobility, vehicles, there was just a ton of stuff not in the rules for when the game became broad in scope. I found that to be consistent I needed to keep track of these rulings and, to be honest, as enthusiastic as I am about RPGs I'm not a game designer. I didn't always make great rulings.

As these rulings became more and more important to the players I reached for the Rules Cyclopedia. It had some answers about things like mass combat, estate, economics, but it didn't answer all of my questions and fit strangely with what I was already trying to do. (The mass combat system in particular in the Rules Cyclopedia proved to be too slow and clunky for what I was trying to accomplish in the game.)

The thin nature of the rules failed to account for some key nuances, requiring me to either "make it up" as these situations arose, which decays player choices and agency, re-arrange in an illusionist fashion to calibrate the challenge OR I commit to the rules, which is what I did, resulting in the problem in the rules becoming clear.

Another problem was horses. In OSE horses travel at 24 miles per day if encumbered and there is no further nuance given. In the Evening Lands OSE Advanced Fantasy campaign as soon as the players bought horses, they could traverse from one end of the sandbox to the other in a day or two. Exploration was over.

In S&W it is nuanced and more limiting, going so far as making the speed of a mount possibly less than their rider in some terrain (and changing it even further if they are trying to map and explore!)

Had S&W been on the table instead of OSE Advanced Fantasy, when they bought horses it would have simultaneously allowed them to carry more items and travel roads quickly, accomplishing their goal of purchasing mounts, while at the same time not negating the entire peril of the sandbox.

There are lots of little examples like this where OD&D (which Swords & Wizardry pulls it's rules from) is facing the world instead of the character. There is no universal attribute bonus it depends on what the attribute is being used for. There's no basic bonus to strength when making a saving throw, you use strength to open doors, or carry more items. You don't add strength to attacks unless you are a fighter. Etc. Etc.

If you are reading this article you are probably aware of many of the differences between OD&D/AD&D and B/X. While subtle, and not majorly different to the newcomer in the OSR, the mechanics of OD&D are world facing, and some of the mechanics in B/X are character facing. Having world facing mechanics appears like complexity, but actually offers solutions to the Referee outside the open system, when situations arise.

B/X, while championed as streamlined and more accessible, limits the scope of the game by preventing the Referee from having tools which convey a grand scope.

OD&D and AD&D, while being accused of having lots of little fiddly bits, continually tell you about the world through their mechanics and provide answers about a world of grand scope and simulation for the Referee.

If there is a horse in the game, the horse has detailed limits on what it can do that fit the game.

Lastly, there's OSE Advanced Fantasy itself. The best I can say is that the classes simply aren't balanced at all in the same way the B/X classes where. The B/X classes are very archetypal and straight forward and fit in the scope of the game while the Advanced Fantasy classes like Bard and Ranger we found to be game breaking, and again, employ the open system for lots of interpretation without being tied to the limits of the implied setting, or even saying anything about the implied setting. Eventually we simply switched back to Classic Fantasy mid game because it caused trouble for us.

I found that Basic D&D had a limited scope for supporting a fantasy simulation on a grand scale. In some ways, B/X I think prefigures the problems that 5e DMs would one day face because of this shift from world facing to player facing mechanics.

3. Treasure for xp, but no strong imperative to spend money

This is related to the previous point but it could basically be summed up in that Old School Essentials does not offer a lot of reasons to buy estate, and there's not much else to spend your thousands of gold pieces worth of treasure on. And yet thousands of gold pieces of treasure is how you level.

At one point they had uncovered some treasure hoards by knocking over a few lairs and had so much gold that, in order to protect the local Halfling economy, the council had decreed gold pieces could not be used!

Other areas gleefully accepted gold tender but the players never saw any reason within their character motivations to spend the money. They couldn't simply buy out local authorities to turn money into hard power and it attracted lots of attention that ran contrary to what they wanted.

At one point they had simply loaded their gold and gems into a wagon drawn by a donkey. Headed to a town the donkey was snatched by a Griffon and they had to flee from a large group of goblins. Having lost all the money the players could only simply shrug at the loss, as it really was just kind of a problem for them anyway.

I know many will read this and already see some problems and have some solutions. I've heard them, many are good! I've heard never allow xp until the money is spent. I particularly like what Shadowdark and Mausritter do, which is provide even greater xp bonuses and other benefits from simply blowing the money on either booze or charity respectively.

The basic problem remains however. The world didn't have a place to put to use the thousands of gold pieces hidden by monsters in their lairs.

Without the imperative to need gold, the world became more static and the reasons to adventure changed. They eventually adventured only because they fell in love with the Halfling shire I placed in the setting, which the players invested in for nearly 3 months of gameplay simply because they loved it. It was never intended to even be an important part of the game. (Sound familiar to those that run modern D&D?)

Ultimately, the magic key of the OSR which drives exploration, gold for xp, was also the end of exploration in the Evening Lands OSE campaign. The players had no reason to explore because they had no need of gold. The campaign ended with one final adventure in a heroic struggle to save the Halfling shire they loved.

Meanwhile, back in Otherworld:

Otherworld on the other hand saw different problems. Too many people wanted to play and I had trouble fitting them in multiple sessions across in person and online groups!

Within a few weeks there were probably 15 different players that wanted to pursue their own goals in Otherworld on the shared calendar. Eventually I had to close down one of the groups and combine them because it was too much for me. A couple years later one of the group’s players took the reigns as Referee and started guiding a new group as some players had to move away from the game, while I continue to plant seeds of multiple new Otherworld campaigns and the shared world grows.

It was so successful I didn't know what to do with it. So what was different?

1. The game came first

We used the rules of the game, and my gazateer was fairly short by comparison. It provided some additional estate options and reorganized them like a list to shop from, and it added in and listed out the gameplay conventions I added back from OD&D and AD&D such as 1:1 time, having a group caller, etc.

I stuck to these conventions. Ask any player that has been in that game of the dozens that played over those couple of years. I stuck to the game rules and conventions always.

Sure I made mistakes, sure I didn't perfectly simulate everything or understand every rule and principle in the 1e DMG right off the bat. But I tried. Consistently, game after game, the game was truly fair. There simply weren't surprises for the players at least for the principles and basis of rules, the 1e DMG and other rules texts were quite thorough and were available to any player. Any player could also summon these rules to correct or assist me.

The result was that in a game that was hard, and had a clear goal, that required money, it was very much a game they could win or lose. Much like a wargame, the players began working together to come up with solutions. They chatted continously between sessions. It was hard to keep up with at time! I even had to create limits on gameplay between sessions just for my real life sake!

An unintended result of placing the game above everything else was that it seperated me even further from adjudication and bias, and enabled the players to take over the decision making in the world.

2. The world was grounded in medieval fantasy and expertly crafted

Evening Lands taught me that I'm not an adventure, dungeon or sandbox designer and have a lot to learn. Here's where both Gary Gygax and many Classical gamers would depart from what I'm sharing, because they will usually propose you create your own sandbox (that's what's suggested in the 1e DMG).

However, much of the adventure design we have today didn't exist back then. It was the culture of the time to simply make your own world.

Rappan Athuk turned out to be a perfect fit for a grand scope Classic adventure game, though I didn't know it at the time. Much like the nearly perfect players I found for the game, serendipity or fate or Divinity provided me the perfect sandbox made by Bill Webb. It was Classic through and through. The dungeons don't make sense in terms of modern design, with long empty hallways and dead ends, and seemingly cruel lack of treasure. But it makes perfect sense for a vast simulation where you are looking at the whole more than the parts.

Rappan Athuk demanded an intense mapping game by the players, I think few could have done it well.

The world building was actually about the same in scope and complexity to Evening Lands, but one world was used almost to the point of wearing the book out the other didn't see use at all. This was partly because every line in Rappan Athuk was a game mechanic or diagetic element - Rumors, money, factions, distances. Weather. Everything in Rappan Athuk was diagetic to the gameplay, and something in the rule books of OD&D and AD&D. Everything in Rappan Athuk the players needed to survive and to make money to pursue their goals.

The sandbox itself was designed in a way that was useful to gameplay. Similar to "Keep on the Borderlands" and other sandbox modules, the entire region was designed so that it demanded adventure to survive and progress. There was a single town and a dungeon within a days travel. The main dungeon complex was not easy to get to and players had to continually make journeys out in the wilderness to map it and find new ways into the dungeon, meanwhile contesting with factions and overland problems.

The whole thing created a loop where they needed to go adventuring to get money, and they needed money to build estate, they needed estate to deal with overland problems and progress their goals (help people, provide security, clear monsters, craft spells, many things!). This was the point of the game. In order for them to accomplish these goals they needed money so they had to return to the dungeon again and again or wrest it from the overland.

The game ran itself, and I was never left trying to figure out how to get the game to start moving again, nor compel the players toward something I thought was interesting. I was truly a Referee, I simply conveyed the procedures, hosted the game and was the fog-of-war between them and what was unknown.

This kind of adventure loop wasn't just the most fascinating I’d ever experienced and player led, but was the most relaxing for me!

3. I had no plan, no plot, no story

Everything that happened in the Rappan Athuk game occured because players made decisions. Other than the fact that if they didn't want to starve they'd need money, and if they didn't want to be killed they needed power (which required money), I offered no proposals for what they ought to be doing.

After I prepared the Rappan Athuk book and the VTT, I did not prep. Seriously, I would write the weather, calendar date and player names and characters on my journal paper and that was my prep. That remains my prep for this playstyle today, unless I decide to take joy in worldbuilding between sessions, which is optional. I make rolls for faction interactions and changes and scribble the changes on the maps, and post xp results and changes to factions and estate in our play club Discord right after the game as part of it's scheduled play.

4. Genre matters - Sword and Sorcery is the rich soil upon which sprouts an astounding game of Dungeons and Dragons.

Otherworld was explicitly Sword and Sorcery. The Overworld was gritty, monsters were evil, and the underworld was horrific. It was not a place to make friends with goblins and orcs. The Evening Lands was "kitchen sink" with elements of Ghibli. You could make friends with goblins and other non-humans. Players could be Dwarves, Elves and Halflings.

I found that the disparate use of a kitchen sink for entertainment took the focus off the gameloop and didn't offer gameplay answers to fictional questions (or I'd have to keep making them up, which wasn't something players were choosing to engage with.)

In a kinder, gentler fantasy world, the only thing that ever made sense to put an adventure toward was heroism and curiosity, and I found this to be an exhausting matter of continually trying to come up with the next entertaining thing to try to keep players playing.

By making all of the players in Otherworld Human, and adhering to the implied setting and genre of OD&D and AD&D, adventure made sense. It made sense to need to go into awful places to get treasure because there was a need to.

Is this the superior way of play?

This Classical Style of play I'd later find as these basic principles mentioned by Gary Gygax. To a modern RPG gamer these principles seem backwards, but I found a truth in them I didn't expect.

Since I've sung so high a praise for this playstyle you might think I consider it superior.

I do not.

There are some downsides to the Classical playstyle:

1. It requires elite players who are highly invested and a complex game system robust enough to support it

There's a reason that Gygax was thought of as an "adversarial Dungeon Master." I don't think he was, I think he was providing a unique kind of game that is rare today.

It was said of Gary that he'd have tons of people over regularly, night after night to his house to explore and adventure in Greyhawk. Tables could house as many people as could fit in the room. Led by a caller, these players would compete with other groups. Stakes were high, the game was serious, and they were in it to win not just experience a story. The overall approach was related to the grand simulations of wargamers at the time, not the intimate storytelling many of us came to know D&D as.

This kind of playing just isn't going to be for everyone. Having a game system that can simulate a fantasy world in it's fine detail takes a lot of work to learn and unique kinds of players.

The players that initially took to "Otherworld: Rappan Athuk" loved spreadsheets, loved tracking details, and loved the challenge. They were really unique people and it was a unique and special kind of game.

There aren't lots of players who are going to want lots of different spreadsheets and a whole book of rules to master, nor players who are going to embrace this kind of difficulty level.

2. The modern adventure game playstyle is just easier and more accessible

With something like Mausritter, Whitebox Swords and Wizardry, Cairn or Shadowdark you can open the book and a regular non-gaming person can generally understand what to do step by step and start adventuring, sometime within minutes.

This fits many people's places in life much better, play with family, kids, strangers, people who are very casual or who haven't played D&D before. It's very easy to set up and play a game of modern adventure gaming. The fact is that while it's less enduring, less grand, less ambitious, it's also still just very fun. Besides that, whose to say it can't go from White Box: Swords and Wizardry to Swords and Wizardry: Complete if your family and friends turn out to want to get more serious? And how many people have made the journey from B/X to Advanced in the history of the hobby? It can be done, but it doesn't need to in order for everyone to have a good time.

You simply don't need a grand campaign lasting decades of play with dozens of players to have a good time.

Conclusion: I have returned to modern adventure games for some of the reasons I mentioned above, but feel like there are elements of Classical play that I can apply to modern Adventure Gaming.

I think that's one of my main things to take away from this. Many of these concepts I could have at least taken parts of and applied to the OSE game with aplomb, and since have with games like Traveller and Shadowdark.

The older ways of doing things continually seem to offer new wisdom to modern games.

I'm glad that through happenstance I was able to experience this style of play, to taste it a bit. It has taught me to try to keep an open mind, to be willing to listen to people.

And I hope that those who are running grand Gygaxian 1e, OD&D, retroclone or ACKS campaigns will flourish, and that the playstyle will catch on more, and that this unique approach will be available for people in the future.

To interact with some of the arbiters of this playstyle I reccommend "by-the-book" forums on "Knights and Knaves" alehouse, some of the players who have played this way from the beginning!

https://knights-n-knaves.com/

I also recommend the podcast "Classic Adventure Gaming" by GusB

You can find used copies of the 1981 Basic Set, 1e DMG on eBay by many sellers for a reasonable price, as well as often at Noble Knight Games. Original D&D is much harder to find sadly.

OSRIC is available for free and is an index and reference document for use with 1e AD&D: https://osricrpg.com/

Swords and Wizardry Complete and Swords and Wizardry White Box are by Mythere: https://www.mythmeregames.com/collections/swords-wizardry

Rappan Athuk for Swords & Wizardry is by Frog God Games: https://www.froggodgames.com/products/32698

Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy is by Necrotic Gnome: https://necroticgnome.com/products/old-school-essentials-rules-tome

https://talestoastound.wordpress.com/traveller-out-of-the-box/

We recently finished our 9 month long Classic Traveller campaign. I had dabbled a bit in Mongoose Traveller 2nd Edition (what some might consider “modern” Traveller) as both a player and Referee but had wanted to run a longer, sprawling, sandbox, science fiction campaign pretty much since I started running and playing RPGs regularly.

And, oh boy! Was it sprawling, sandbox and science fiction!

Having ran or played in many science fiction roleplaying games, including some I truly adore, I can say with certainty-

Classic Traveller tops the list of science fiction RPGs for me

You can listen to the majority of the campaign on our podcast “Adventures in the Void” - https://adventuresinthevaletaverncast.podbean.com/

And you can see the entire thing including it’s strange and stuttering beginning on our Youtube channel - https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3c4xRmyQ_SKvpKNPdq4r5wsS51HW7JNp&si=HXgp3EKbEJGbHQ76

While I had tremendous fun running this campaign, and enjoyed the thoughtful, dedicated and often hilarious players that were in the group for the long haul, I have to admit I didn’t find the process of learning Classic Traveller to be easy or intuitive.

There are some things I’d do differently.

I also don’t think it has to be as hard as what I went through to learn for those with no experience.

I was incredibly intimidated by Traveller. I had put off running a serious campaign of it for several years.

What I hope this post will serve to do is aid others like me who are also standing at the precipice as a new Classic Traveller referee, perhaps feeling a bit intimidated by it’s scope and major departure from the tried and true D&D formula.

I also hope this post will be useful to the many veteran 2D6 Referees out there to give a perspective of what it felt like being a new Referee coming into the 2D6 Sci fi world.

I’ll briefly decsribe the game and our campaign. Then I’ll go straight into what I’d do differently and why. That section will read as a list of things to do for new Referees, but should be taken as advice I would have given my past self. Hopefully it will be useful to someone else also.

Lastly, I’ll offer some personal “dos and don’ts” about the Traveller experience and community.

Before we begin there are are a few parameters I’d like any reader to understand to help with the context of this information:

• This information is just an expression of my experience as a new Classic Traveller Referee. It shouldn’t be taken as an opinion on what works for everyone or strict rules for anyone.

• This is from the point of view of someone who is trying to run Classic Traveller, “by-the-book.” I fully recognize there is an entire world of Traveller RPG content (and have enjoyed a lot of it!), and am not in this post explaining why I chose to try to run Classic Traveller or to try and do it strictly “by-the-book.”

  Perhaps that could be for a later post. What I will assure the reader is that the rules work, straight from the pages of the 3 little black books from 1977, and that it produces a very fun game.

  Whenever I engage with the Traveller community I find they often have different goals than me. While I love most of what the Traveller community has to offer, consider this 2nd precept please before commenting, else I will say “please go back and see what the blog post is about!” This not about Traveller in general, this is about a by-the-book, sandbox campaign of Classic Traveller.

What is Traveller?

Traveller is to science fiction adventure gaming what Dungeons and Dragons is to medieval fantasy adventure gaming.

Or at least it ought to be.

Traveller (1977) is the original science fiction space-faring roleplaying game. While elements of sci fi existed in many D&D communities and settings, and Metamorphosis Alpha would publish the first sci fi RPG in 1975, Traveller was the first roleplaying game to truly depart from D&D completely.

The entire formula of D&D is subverted. You aren’t seeking gold, treasure, or necessarily even adventure. In Traveller adventure finds you. You take on the role of a space-faring pulp sci fi inhabitant who specializes in xeno-medicine, starship piloting, driving ATVs on low gravity planets in a Vacc-suit all while trying to profit and stay alive.

I’ve found Classic D&D to be an easy game to sum up to new players:

“You are a fantasy medieval adventurer who travels to dangerous places to find treasure while evading or defeating lethal monsters.”

Classic D&D can be more than that, but it also can be that simple.

Traveller sounds nonsensical when stated simply. To quote Rick Stump

“Traveller is a game about space truckers that sometimes solve murder mysteries.”

To put it even more strangely:

“Traveller is a science fiction game about trying to escape your debt and pay your mortgage.”

To many this proposed gameplay loop ends the conversation then and there. (Nevermind the infamous aspects of character creation among other things!) Traveller is perhaps the first RPG to truly depart from the D&D gameplay loop. Anyone who plays D&D knows that the gameplay loop of beginning in a settlement and travelling through a wilderness to a dungeon, descending into it and exploring it to find treasure while evading monsters will inevitably result in fun.

The gameplay loop of barely escaping character creation alive to have a ton of debt and being forced to take undesirable jobs and trade space burgers between dingy starports while mishaps happen also inevitably results in fun.

I’m not sure what else to say about that except “trust me bro.” This is a quality of Traveller that simply must be experienced.

For an in depth treatment of this “gameplay loop” I recommend “The Four Table Legs of Traveller” by Sir Poley - https://sirpoley.tumblr.com/tagged/FourLegsofTraveller. Albeit, Sir Poley experienced this using modern Traveller, whose differences will not be discussed here.

I’ve found it can only be experienced by actually doing it, not mitigating the game, it’s scope, it’s intent or the rules. Actually using the rules of Classic Traveller will produce the dream campaign of “Firefly” or “Solo.” But, do you actually want to be in a game where you are barely getting by job to job and bounty hunters are tracking you to pay your debts in an unfair galaxy?

You do! It’s a blast I assure you!

Mythic Traveller - Spinward Marches Campaign

Our campaign lasted around 9 months. Character creation in Traveller is one of the game modules you’ll actually play through instead of it being a pen and paper exercise as it is in D&D with charts. There are charts, but you’ll make decisions and roll dice. Not only that, you may perish then and there. Many of the players did lose Travellers and had to start over in the available time. Some of them were booted out of the military (pretty much everyone starts in the military in Classic Traveller) with a few thousand space bucks and hardly any discernible skills.

One player survived about five terms as a Merchant Officer and had the either tremendous luck or misfortune, depending on how you look at it, of rolling a Free Trader. He started with a starship he was paying the mortgage on at the beginning of the game.

From there they set out with a very basic premise in the “Charted Space” setting, which is like the Forgotten Realms of the Traveller community (but far grander and more ubiquitous, many Traveller enthusiasts just like the setting). They had been pushed out after their time in the Fifth Frontier War to the Spinward Marches where they started eeking by to get good work. They started with a job by the Scout Services, quickly became “big damn heroes”, and while most weeks of gameplay consisted of struggling to pay the bills just enough to get to the next starport and pick up the next load of cargo and work, by the end they basically saved the entire sector and were Knighted by the Emperor of the Grand Empire of Stars, Emperor Strephon himself.

The first 2-3 months were pretty shaky, that was for a number of reasons, few to do with Traveller so I won’t discuss it here. Around month 4 we started humming along as a crew and making tough and impactful decisions from planet to planet. And that’s what it was. There was always the need to pay off that mortgage and to have enough money to eat and survive in space, and that meant they were compelled to get into trouble. Once in trouble they had to make hard decisions, and figure out how to turn things around to get the next job, keep getting paid and keep flying.

In the course of chasing space bucks they became Rangers on a world of dog-people they saved from an exploding volcano, probably caused a world-war on an ocean planet, and finally unravelled the mystery of a hidden faction pulling the strings on a seperatist terrorist group, the very Space Vikings they had made friends with to get a pulse laser for their ship. The Captain of the player’s crew duelled the Space Viking Captain on the deck of the villain’s frigate for the fate of the sector. With actual swords.

It eventually became packed with choices and tension, really that was what it was like to me, choice after choice, planet after planet. It was really a sci fi sandbox unlike what I thought would be possible.

What I’d do differently

Unfortunately, I have to confess the game took a lot of work. Many RPGs still contain some kind of underlying kinship with D&D, or depart from having a ‘loop’ all together in some way. Traveller has a loop, but it’s completely unlike D&D.

In the beginning this game took me hours upon hours of preparation. Now, it takes very little, just like my classic D&D games. This has more to do with mindset, tools and experience than procedure. I hope to offer some of that mindset, those tools and procedures here.

The game system itself did not lend itself to the kind of picky experimentation that I used to dabble in, and eventual dive head long into, the OSR. I would eventually find that some seeming “problems” that existed in the campaign existed only because I simply didn’t read the book thoroughly and employ all of it’s systems. I did probably 90% when I should have done 100%.

Like B/X and old school D&D however, it was less about the rules (especially player facing ones) and more about how the rules work.

Traveller is the most diagetic game I’ve ever seen.

Every game concept is shared by inhabitants of the universe. The character sheet, called the UPP, is a concept in the fictional world. So are planetary profiles and how sectors work. Every mechanic in the world is pretty much something the characters in the world would know about and the way they are described in the rules are the same way fictional characters would talk about them. Terms and names for things have no difference between what players know and what characters know. You can sometimes forget if you are in or out of character.

For this reason, by not fully using the whole book in places, I actually understood less about the implied setting and how it interlocks with other features.

The campaign mostly went well, and I mostly ran it by-the-book successfully. But if I could have done it over again, these are the things I would have told myself to do in the beginning:

1. Gain genre literacy

This is something I’d accomplish closer to halfway through the campaign, but should have done before I started. As a teen I loved golden age sci fi like Asimov, Heinlein and O.S. Card, but pulp sci-fi wasn’t around in my junior high school library. I had no exposure to the science fiction that informed Classic Traveller.

Some will say something similar about D&D, that to really enjoy it to it’s fullest extent you must read Appendix N. I don’t think that’s true. I think Dungeons and Dragons serves almost as an emmisarry of sword and sorcery in the public conscience more than the other way around. Everyone knows what treasure chests, goblins and dungeons are.

Pulp sci fi isn’t something I think people are as acquainted with. At least not me.

Some will say that there are films or TV you might be able to replace with this, or video games. I respectfully disagree with this also. I know the shows and films they speak of, and I watched them before the campaign. No, there are two books I’ll mention shortly that I consider must reads. Watching “Firefly” is a good ‘mood setter’ perhaps but it won’t help you understand Classic Traveller.

Another thing that is important about sci fi pulp genre literacy is that Traveller is one of the most improvisational games I’ve ever seen.

If you are like me and intimidated by Traveller already, I can imagine how daunting that must sound. You must be able to improvise situations entirely from six characteristics given about an entire planet, if you want a true merchant campaign sandbox.

I would propose the key here isn’t raw skill or practice, but to “prepare to improvise.” If you have experience in Classic D&D you do this all the time. You roll 6 kobolds. You know the terrain nearby, the weather and date, the factions and the lairs. The game system tells you how far they are, if they spot you and what their attitude is. From this information alone you use the power of your mind, apophenia, to fill in the blanks. This is the engine of Classic D&D.

The same is true of Traveller. You know the worlds size relative to Earth, with Earth about a “8” on a scale of 1-10 (determines it’s gravity also), you know it’s air, water, government, law level and level of technology. You’ll also know if the solar system has a gas giant and if there’s a military base in orbit. From that information you must improvise what the Travellers will see when they get to the starport, and it must inform the other random rolls of random person encounters, aliens in the wilderness and starships.

That’s pretty much Classic Traveller in a paragraph.

If that sounds daunting, you need to read some pulp sci fi. Prepare to improvise.

If I could do it over again, I’d tell myself I simply had to read two books before beginning the campaign.

Winds of Gath - E.C. Tubb

This one novel is the closest thing to a bible I can point to for Classic Traveller. From the very first few pages it begins to explain a world written within the Classic Traveller rules that otherwise makes no sense to me. A starship-hopping, space hobo named Dumarest has to find just enough money to hop on the next starship to get work or he’ll starve to death or be enslaved. It explains concepts as central to Classic Traveller as low and high passage, space rations, space nobility, a sci fi galaxy of lower tech and high social intrigue, and the actual concept of a “Traveller” itself, which are the central characters of the book series. A “Traveller” is basically a space hobo. Someone desperate for any work at all just to eat, but in space.

To me, a new Referee interested in Classic Traveller who has no previous experience with pulp sci fi or Traveller like me, seeking to run the game straight out of the book, must read Winds of Gath. Not only are implied setting concepts explained in the novel, but there are two very, very key concepts to understanding Classic Traveller which someone who reads this novel will understand.

• The implied setting of Classic Traveller is profoundly unfair and unequal. It can be like a far future post apocalypse.

• You think being scrappy and gritty is being Captain Malcolm Reynolds or Han Solo. For Classic Traveller, you need to lower your expectations further to the dirt. The math of starting with a starship is so incredibly low with a group of players that you ought to assume that being a scrappy starship crew with a beat up used tin can trying to survive job to job is actually a long ways UP for you! More on this later, but a space hobo with 3,000 credits and a dagger to his name rubbing elbows with a former sector Baron or Knight who due to disgrace and circumstance must struggle to survive is more akin to starting characters than Han Solo. Han Solo is the end game.

Space Viking - H. Beam Piper

Winds of Gath will explain what it is to be a Traveller down in the mud of a poor, scrappy frontier planet in a far future space apocalypse.

Space Viking will explain from the top down what it is to be a Space Baron commanding Starship fleets in that same space apocalypse.

Space Viking is about, well, a Space Viking. A noble lord in a far future reconstruction of viking culture spanning dozens of worlds who have long since forgotten what Earth was about or human progress. Instead they raid and pillage the former planets of what was once an enlightened human interstellar polity.

Space Viking explains tech levels, planetary profiles, interstellar politics, types of governments and isms by planet, the trouble of an “age of sail” in space where signals move slower than starships, and many other things implicit in the Classic Traveller rules become clear by reading this book.

The most important thing is the sense of how seperated planets are by this age-of-sail. Signals cannot travel faster than light, so messages can only be brought from planet to planet in person. It can take months to hear news from another sector, and what you recieve might be whispered rumors in a scummy starport bar.

The other key idea is planetary profiles including wildly different governments, climates and technology. One planet may be a Greek City Republic on a near airless moon maintaining ancient technology for sustenance while another planet might have anti-gravity devices and their own local starship fleets ready for battle…but with an EVIL SPACE EMPIRE (that’s not tired, is it?)

These assumptions about how the far future work, about cycles of history, lost knowledge and the vast differences between planets are crucial to understanding the rules of Classic Traveller in my opinion.

If I could do it over again, I would have read those two books first.

2. Let Traveller be Traveller

This is a complaint I’ll get into later in the “dont’s” section but many people will suggest the key to Traveller is to take it in parts. RPGs can often be taken in parts. If I could do it over again I would not alter the rules of Classic Traveller, at all.

Yes, I broke down a couple of “Chesterton’s fences” for our campaign.

First, because one player had a Free Trader and I had a ‘heroic assumption’ that “this is like Firefly!” because I had no conception of stories of pulpy space hoboes as in “Winds of Gath”, I took a page out of the modern Traveller game and gave each Traveller each skill necessary to operate a 200-ton starship. Everyone started the game with Pilot-1, Navigator-1, Gunnery-1, Engineer-1 etc.

For the most part, I followed the rules of the book closely, but this….

I was wrong. And it did have an impact on the game.

There is a natural tendency to look at a game and simply discard anything that may stand in the way of “fun.” Traveller enjoyers are frequent culprits, which is well and good, especially if you have a specific kind of game in mind and aren’t seeking a by-the-book sandbox sci-fi simulation that is the point of this article.

They will toss out the need to place down a multi-million credit downpayment to even start with debt for a starter ship, they will toss out the rules about dying in character creation, or allow Travellers to start with certain skills and bonuses, or allow for some form of character progression (that’s not really in Classic Traveller by the way). There’s plenty here to toss and change. But for those who this article is for that are starting out, that affects the pacing of the game.

If you go back to my earlier discovery that this isn’t about a scrappy Han Solo, but potentially desperate space hobos, you can see how this would suddenly alter any concerns that exist for new Referees daunted by the size and scope of a Traveller sector. Give the players a ship and the ability to scoop fuel, and suddenly you may indeed have a group of renegades who will travel 500 light years across 3 sectors, investing in nothing and to no point or end as they out run their mortgage and the bounty hunters. Worse, there won’t be any point to it. The drama occuring in a sector, a solar system or a planet won’t matter. I observe this as a “this planet sucks, let’s leave!” phenomenon which we experienced to a light degree. That may sound like the players fault, a bad behavior in D&D to be sure, but it isn’t. Traveller punishes you for getting too close to conflict and problems, it’s lethal, expensive and problems beget more problems. It just makes sense to keep skipping town if you can take a load of cargo and have the ship.

But can you skip town if no one starts with a ship? And even if you have a ship if you have to afford a pilot on hire how would that work? By the way, even if you can scoop fuel, life support is damned expensive and there’s a limit due to that life support of how many people you can cram into state rooms. These aren’t the only restraints and complications that arise either.

Much like in Classic D&D, the paradox here is that restraints enable choices and generate drama. If you allow the restraints to arise naturally by using the rules in the book, it will create all of the natural pacing to get a full campaign out of a sector, heck, to get the better part of a campaign on a planet or in a solar system. This organically solves the problem of space being big for the Referee.

By the time the players do have a Jump-6 starship (which by my reckoning would take years of play), they are fully invested in the world and it’s conflicts and things have developed context. Just like in a classic D&D campaign where high levels with powerful spells, estate and droves of henchmen do not come from a vacuum but from a steady investment in the overworld, which creates the needed high level challenges for characters with such resources.

So don’t give gimmes and alter the rules at the outset! Follow the rules and allow the setting to naturally grow from the ground up.

Speaking of a science fiction adventure setting growing from the ground up, let’s talk about it from top down also, another intimidating aspect for new Referees. How much should you prepare for a planet in advance 15 parsecs away from their starting planet? How much should you prepare for each solar system or faction?

About a paragraph at most but often a sentence. Seriously!

This is another example of something that I should have used the whole book for and not altered things. At the time the use of https://travellermap.com/ just seemed like the “easy button” for getting a game to the table. All the sectors, all the details, everything about every planet is quickly available at the click of a button. It really is a great resource.

If I could do it over again, I would have made my own sector.

What I didn’t realize at the time is that sector generation actually has important rules for the game, including the way the implied setting works. In my case just to point to one error I made, I had assumed that since the fuel of the setting was liquid Hydrogen and this was processed primarily from gas giants, that gas giants must be a rare and contested resources. This would create problems I hadn’t anticipated, including the subtle suggestion that there are automatic things which occur arriving into a system and assumed times and distances.

When I began creating my own sector after the campaign was over, I discovered the opposite was explicitly stated about worlds, that gas giants are extremely common and it’s a very rare thing to have a solar system without one. Having a solar system without a gas giant is something akin to having an extremely difficult terrain in a hex map, or a passage which is very difficult to pass through. Especially considering some parsecs are completely void.

The idea that most systems should work that way subtly guided the campaign world for us toward one of unecessary desperation and difficulty for the players. This is just one example, sector generation also explains a lot about tech levels, trade, military bases and more.

In some ways the sector generation section is like the DMG of the game. It says too much about the implied world and how it can be game-able as a campaign for it to be left unvisited by the Referee.

Of course, the other benefit of creating your own sector is that you come to know that sector, and your mind will automatically begin filling in details about how trade routes and polities might work. Don’t feel intimidated by this or held back, this is something to aim toward not to have nailed down completely.

If you run Classic D&D, think of it this way. You should be able to spend between an afternoon to 2 weeks depending on how much elbow grease you use creating the required elements for a Classic D&D sandbox. You need a starting town with necessary places to buy, sell, rest, train and identify items. You need a few hexes, maybe between 6-12 around the area with points of interest to travel through. You need a dungeon within a hex or so of the starting town to start things off with. That dungeon ought to start with a level or 2.

Voila! You have the minimum ingredients that will naturally grow in time for your sandbox. For the town you might need between 1 page to 3 about it’s NPCs and locations. For the wilderness each hex probably only needs between a sentence to a paragraph and some will be empty. The dungeon needs about a sentence to a paragraph per non-empty room, consisting of 5-15 stocked rooms, maybe you would like a page about the setting, a page about the nearby area and a page about the dungeon including wandering monsters.

A Classic Traveller sandbox works the same. You need to create a sector, which the book will guide you by the hand very well in doing, unlike most classic D&D games. This will take about an afternoon, and you’ll have between a sentence to a paragraph about each planet. Maybe you want to make a page about the overall situation in the sector. For your starting solar system you’ll want some details to start, companies, random persons and patrons. The game will naturally pace attaining interesting jobs and adventures (you only get one chance a week to find a patron on 5+ on a D6!) With the starting area, a nearby “sandbox” wilderness which might be work on the planet or interplanetary work in a solar system, and a rough sketch of the sector, you have everything you need to start and the rules will do the heavy lifting of anyone’s concerns about how vast space is or how daunting it sounds to create an interstellar sandbox.

While there are some who would say this for all RPGs, in the case of Classic Traveller I advise my past self to read the entire book front to back. Including sections that might not yet seem relevent like vehicles, drugs and sector generation. The point here isn’t to try and memorize or get down each rule, but as in my classic RPGs of the 70’s, to get a sense of how the rules and the implied world work.

3. Download and use the 1981 Starter Set - “Charts”

Page flipping is a major problem in the original books. If you want to create the rules for trade on a planet (crucial if someone starts with a free trader) you have to look in 3 seperate places across the 3 booklets, all of whom have their own page numberings and tables of contents. You’ll need to understand the “basics of Travelling” then you’ll need to go to the section that tells you to generate the state of trade in the parsecs that surround the current world and use those rules, then you’ll need a seperate section later for the mini-game on speculative trade.

Another example of this is items. For some reason, after character creation weapons and armor are listed right away for purchase, but actual gizmos and items arent mentioned until the 3rd book in a section near vehicles and world information. I’m embarrased to say this led to a situation where at first I simply assumed gizmos weren’t even part of the game (it’s true that Classic Traveller has a much more constrained and generic list of items, and imo makes it actually easier to run than modern Traveller!)

I can think of other examples but the bottom line is if you are just using either the 3 little black books or the Facsimile (by the way, use one of those two, not the “Traveller Adventure” or “Starter Set” box sets) you are gonna do a loooot of page flipping to use the rules. My facsimile book is smothered in little bookmarks which proved to be so many that at a certain point useless to discern from one another.

Worse, you may not naturally come to know or memorize rules this way. We had the experience of adventuring on a planetary wilderness for nearly six sessions of play, only to return to space and forget where the section in the book is for safe jump distances/misjumps and starship encounters vs. space combat. Traveller is really a bunch of different games, and you won’t use all of them all the time.

For this reason, I found it utterly essential to find and use the Starter Edition 1981 - “Charts” book. This is really just the end pages of condensed rules or GM screen that is essential imo for running Classic Traveller by the book.

The Starter Edition - “Charts” book is essentially the condensed procedures of Classic Traveller, in order, by phase of gameplay from creating a character to creating a sector. It also makes character creation easier and more streamlined, lists space operations from jumping to combat to random encounter in order as it would be done during the game. The 1981 rules are slightly different and add some things, but the new Classic Traveller Referee shouldn’t have trouble sussing that out as they use this tool.

The rulebook simply doesn’t do this. If the license were open, I could imagine a world where we could have an OSRIC or an Old School Essentials of Traveller, where the procedures are put together in an easy index or reference for the table. In the meantime, “Charts” is the closest thing to that I found and I used it every single time we played after I discovered it.

Unfortunately, it looks like you’ll need to get the entire Starter Set to use the Charts book, which is one book of 3 in that set. You can find that here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/80190/CTSTStarter-Traveller

(NOTE: I do not recommend the rest of the Starter Set for the purpose of this blog post, for the Classic Traveller Referee who is new and wanting to experiment with the original game as written. The Starter Set includes a lot of new content, ideas and concepts not included in the original game and was released in an era of Traveller where many linear adventures and modules had been published. There is a slight tilt in the boxed set toward this idea of linear adventures, which isn’t what we are trying to achieve here.)

Those are the 3 things I would have told myself to begin with at the outset of preparing a Classic Traveller campaign. I believe they would have helped me earlier on, and I hope they are useful to others.

There are also some things I’d tell myself to steer clear of:

Some “do’s and don’ts”

1. DO NOT listen to people on the internet

One might say this about D&D also, but I think it’s especially true of Traveller. Here is where I’ll note what I think is the greatest barrier to the new Referee interacting with the Traveller community.

The Traveller community seems at pains to emphasize that Traveller doesn’t need to be Traveller.

A harsh criticism. But a warning I would issue to anyone who wants to try Classic Traveller straight out of the book and experience a sci fi sandbox, who has never done it before.

The truth is that the writer of the original 3 black books did a great job, the game works and is fun, and you can read it and run it and it will be great.

Most of the discourse online, and in fact most personalities that enjoy Traveller, will right away suggest modifying Classic Traveller in some way. Many of these people have played Traveller for decades. The problem with this is that these people have had those decades of experience. I have not. It might seem strange to them that anyone would want to try the original game the way it was originally presented. They after all, were the very arbiters of change, the community which saw the various modifications and splat books like the Merchant Prince and Mercenaries splat books. They endured upheaval and changes to the game, many of which are reviled to this day. Finally they arrived at a Traveller renaissance in the modern era, where they have their own favorite form of Traveller whether it be Cepheus, Mongoose or some modification of the original.

There are also an immense number of people in the Traveller community who are here for the setting. They might even still be employing T20 (D&D Traveller) or GURPS, which don’t even use the Traveller game system. The charted space setting is immensely popular, and I too am a fan. Much like D&D, there are droves of casual fans of the products who don’t really use the rules and aren’t interested in a serious game of Traveller.

It’s also true that you don’t need to do this ambitious project at all. You can chuck a couple of D6’s to get an ‘8’, and engineer a scenario around rescuing some alien people from a slaver ship or something and bam! You’ve got a great Traveller game on your hands. This was indeed true from the beginning according to the creator of the game. Traveller also had in mind scenario play, modular play and even solitaire play. You don’t need a grand merchant campaign to enjoy the game.

Lastly, the true veterans of the community that understand the game suffer from a general problem I see in tabletop, which I’d simply call humility. They love Traveller, but are open to new ideas, to newcomers and variant approaches. Because of this humility they are likely to simply tell you “Eh, as long as you are having fun, it’s still Traveller.” While they aren’t wrong, this will not help the intimidated Referee seeking to do a by-the-book Classic Traveller campaign.

For those reasons, I’ve included a couple of resources for those that I know do Classic Traveller by-the-book:

First there’s “Ancient Faith in the Far Future.” If you aren’t into religion, or whatever, don’t worry. The blog actually has little do with that regardless of if you don’t like religion. It’s mostly a blog about the person’s experience with a serious treatment of Classic Traveller.

https://ancientfarfuture.blogspot.com/

Secondly, I recommend Rick Stump’s blog and community “Don’t Split the Party.” His blog resources are more slim regarding Classic Traveller, but if you contribute to his patreon, his Discord is one of the best for a serious and mature treatment of classic games I’ve ever seen.

https://harbingergames.blogspot.com/

Others could be mentioned, honorable mentions go to “RPG Elite” who has a series on Classic Traveller (and he has the philosophy that games are better when done by the book and with serious investment), Ardwulf’s Lair which has a great couple of videos on Traveller in general and character creation specifically, The Last Redoubt blog which focuses on classic sci fi tabletop, The Careful Rogue blog, TheBasicExpert who has a whole series on Classic Traveller and going through the books and The Love of Wargaming which has a great video explaining vector based space combat (which isn’t usually necessary, even according to the book, but is fun to look at.)

2. DO NOT use a linear module for this

Much like D&D, there came a time when people were disatisfied with the sprawling, ambitious, perhaps inaccessible wargame culture of tabletop for Traveller from which the game arose. Indeed, few had the necessary tools, time or expertise to run games the way many of the progenitors did and the way Marc Miller did with his friends in college communities dedicated to wargames.

Within a couple of years after Traveller’s publication the company began writing adventure modules. Some of them are real gems including “Startown Liberty” and “Prison Planet”, but frankly, most are poorly written novels with a fixed plotline and the expectation that players will do the next thing, and the next thing.

This was a major mistake I made multiple times, and was a false premise upon which I started the campaign with two groups. Thinking that perhaps some Classic Traveller modules might be like the open ended, location based “B” modules of ancient D&D, I had promised many players “We will play some of the classic adventure modules!”

I will not mention it’s name here, but I started with a modern module which seemed simple. Frankly, for the goal of kickstarting a science fiction sandbox, it was just terrible. I couldn’t imagine a worse module, and I really didn’t understand the extent to which it was stifling play until we were already a couple sessions in.

Later I’d employ a couple of other modules, which fall apart like all linear modules including modern WOTC culprits. For one I had to completely rewrite the thing so that it had actual choices. This was really time wasted imo, for a campaign that really sang when the players were making choices rather than having choices strongly recommended because the Referee prepped something so hard.

I’m happy to say today that I use zero-prep or low prep modules or no modules (modules as tools and locations), and I do almost no prep for our ongoing Classic Traveller campaign. The world is the prep. The rest is up to the players.

3. DO NOT over prep planets, solar systems beyond your sector generation.

Just have at most a paragraph per planet until it becomes relevent. You must improvise from the UWP (Planet’s information)! If they end up on adventures on the planet or in the solar system THEN prep maybe a page or so to improvise from.

4. DO find very invested players with an equal interest in pulp sci fi and science fiction simulation

This might be the hardest part. If you also want to take on the amitious project of a Classic Traveller campaign, by-the-book, you will need some dedicated players, which I was blessed to find.

They will need to be dedicated because it will be up to the players to know what their ship’s software is and when to exchange it in space combat, and how to calculate the costs of life support, fuel and whether or not it’s feasible to upgrade to cover new software or a ship’s module.

They will need to be dedicated so that they can do their own calculations on whether they can kill through ablative armor at medium range with a revolver.

Yes, Classic Traveller can actually be really simple compared to modern games for the player (not for the Referee.) But it has areas with crunch. It also demands someone that understands the basics of the world for anything to work. If you present an honest game of Classic Traveller, they will perish if they don’t understand the world of the game.

If you find a group of players who will dedicate themself to the Classic Traveller sci-fi simulation, you can have the “Firefly” dream campaign. But it’s not for everyone!

5. DO create your own sector and read the novels above, even if you don’t have players or a game yet -

This is like the “world first” aspect of classic gaming in general. It can provide years of play regardless of the players and time played. Classic Traveller from the very beginning assumed solitaire play was a viable option.

Much like the ambitious classic gamer preparing a campaign of 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, if you use the rules, then emphasize the world, it will enable play for many players over a very long period of time.

In the case of many Classic Traveller Referees they have “In my Traveller Universe”, beginning with a single sector, the development of a far future civizilation that can be adventured in has been a decades long passion project.

Like other classic games, this can be the best starting point when you don’t have players yet. Of course, if you can find a group as a player, that’s great! But don’t wait to start creating your science fiction world. As the old movie quote goes, “If you build it, they will come.”

And when they do, you’ll be ready.

Conclusion

I hope this advice to my past self from a year ago will prove useful to others that aspire to try the original science fiction roleplaying game by the book.

It is a challenge. It’s a challenge worth confronting and you will succeed. On the other side of that challenge is the dream of scrappy starship crews getting into trouble and trying to survive in space.

If you disagree or have your own experiences to share, please share them below! (Please keep in mind the two starting precepts for this blog post)

Happy Travelling! 07 Travellers

Cover artwork is by Alex Dzuricky of “Knight at the Opera” blog and Dwiz - see their artwork here: https://www.instagram.com/knight_at_the_opera/

And check out their blog here including a post about the cover of the original Traveller RPG - https://knightattheopera.blogspot.com/2024/05/the-best-rpg-cover-of-all-time.html

The 1981 version of the game is completely free here:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/355200/Classic-Traveller-Facsimile-Edition?

The Traveller game in all forms is owned by Far Future Enterprises. Copyright 1977 - 2008 Far Future Enterprises. Traveller is a registered trademark of Far Future Enterprises. Far Future permits web sites and fanzines for this game, provided it contains this notice, that Far Future is notified, and subject to a withdrawal of permission on 90 days notice. The contents of this site are for personal, non-commercial use only. Any use of Far Future Enterprises's copyrighted material or trademarks anywhere on this web site and its files should not be viewed as a challenge to those copyrights or trademarks. In addition, any program/articles/file on this site cannot be republished or distributed without the consent of the author who contributed it.

I have often found it difficult to describe classical or old-school tabletop play to modern players. There are significant differences between modern and old school D&D that require, as Matt Finch says, “fundamental modern gaming concept(s) need(ing) to be flipped on their head.”

Video games are commonly used as “cultural touchstones” for tabletop role-playing games when making a pitch to your table. That makes sense after all, video games inherited their design from tabletop. The conversation is overwhelmingly dominated by one, single statement though:

”It's like Dark Souls.”

This is not an entirely wrong statement, but it's also created a barrier for entry for people to try OSR games and really understand them.

Dark Souls is:

• Single player

• The community expectation for Dark Souls is to repeatedly die as you gain player skill

• Heavily combat oriented

In these ways Dark Souls significantly departs from OSR game-play, or at the very least fails to express it's depth, especially it's lack of focus on larger groups of 3-12 people. As I argue in my article “The Myth of OSR lethality”, while OSR games are much more lethal than the modern D&D RPG, there's no need to lose characters or an expectation that you will die. You can reliably survive in most classic D&D games if you make smart choices. Additionally, while combat is a central feature of classic D&D, you can also avoid it all together, and there are incentives to do so.

What results from the constant message of “It's just like Dark Souls” is a misconception of Old School games that they are a death fetish. It's an unfortunate and unfair reputation.

(Note, that may also just be an unfair impression of Dark Souls and here's an awesome blog article that argues the opposite: Darks Souls IS the OSR: https://terriblesorcery.blogspot.com/2015/09/dark-souls-is-classic-d-in-modern-video.html )

As I often point out, we held a 14 month long Old School Essentials campaign and no one died until month 13. In our Swords & Wizardry campaign we average perhaps 1 death every 3-4 months of consistent, weekly game-play that includes about 6 players. Certainly more than modern D&D, but we also have characters who have lasted for years. Some OSR games are meat grinders (Mork Borg, DCC funnels) and that can be fun. Some groups are more lethal than others, but it's proven a barrier to entry for people who might like everything else the OSR has to offer.

For that reason, I've asked multiple online OSR communities for help devising a list of those video games that really capture the “feel” or “vibe” of playing a pencil and paper adventure game. My hope is this list will act as a tool for new players to see if they might be interested in the OSR, but also as a list of diversions for those already experiencing the joy of Classical D&D.

Before we begin, some disclaimers.

This is just my opinion and the opinion of others I have gathered. I'm not telling you how to play your game or what video games to play.

You may find you disagree with some of what I consider Old School, what is included or what has been left out, and in what order I have decided they approach the OSR game play experience in. I consider this a good thing. Feel free to share your disagreements and alternative suggestions in the comments.

The categories of games and their order of inclusion is based on my opinion of what most closely approaches the classical D&D pencil and paper tabletop experience not what makes the best video game.

I'm starting with a list of genres or categories of video games to explore and some brief examples, including areas where they are different from OSR game-play and areas where they are similar, in order of the top 5 genres from least similar to most.

After that I'll provide my top ten video games suggested by the OSR online community (and some of my own).

By genre or category:

Action RPGs

Examples: Diablo (and it's sequels and clones), Torchlight, Path of Exile, Grim Dawn, Dungeon Siege, Lost Ark, Bard's Tale, Black Dragon.

Actions RPGs have some important things in common with old school D&D, but their core game-play experience proves in my opinion to be too different to really feel like playing a classic pencil and paper game.

Similarities

ARPGs have lots of item and resource management, an open ended approach to encounters (adventures usually take place in locations that are open ended or dungeons), no “plot” that puts narration before experiences that emerge through game play (at least in older ARPGs), and it can be deadly when making poor choices.

Differences

ARPGs differ significantly from an OSR pencil and paper experience because they have a heavy focus on combat, they focus on a single character, the character is immensely powerful and able to take on waves or hordes of enemies, there is a lot of emphasis on “building” your character and optimizing their features and systems to be most effective and the genre is usually high fantasy and “epic” or over-the-top.

Classic, Old School and Retro-MMOs

Examples: Classic World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies, Dark Age of Camelot, Old School Runescape, Everquest 1, Ultima Online, Ember's Adrift, Conan: Exiles.

Similarities:

It could be argued that Classic or Old School Massively Multiplayer Online RPG's also emulate classic D&D. For those who like MMOs but who have sought out the classic versions such as Classic WOW and OSRS, you likely have some things in common with those that have likewise sought out the classic versions of tabletop games for similar reasons.

Classic MMOs emphasize a big, open world to explore. They aren't condescending, it's up to the players to seek their own adventure and find what interests them in the world. The story is what happens not what's told to you. The game is challenging and it's immensely rewarding to work with your friend to overcome monsters and obstacles that far outclass a single character.

MMOs also have persistent game elements in a social environment, something that the oldest version of D&D did and many classical gamers do today with tables of dozens of adventurers that play at different times on a unified calendar that passes 1:1 with the real world. The world may act regardless of player success or failure the way meta-plots worked in original Runescape, Star Wars Galaxies and The Matrix Online. Classic D&D players also work towards eventually having estate, and making their mark on the world, in the same way that attaining special armor, mounts and titles as well as housing in Classic MMOs is a huge achievement. Getting a magic sword in classic D&D is a big deal.

Differences:

Classic MMOs, even incredibly open ended ones like Star Wars galaxies, ultimately suffer from having limitations that pencil and paper games don't have. Worst of all, MMOs depend on a host and usually a corporation who can change your game and progress at any time, or in the case of many abandoned classic MMOs they depend on private servers that can get shut down by the corporations that no longer support them. The glory of pencil and paper games is that the table is the authority, not corporations who need to make a profit off keeping you invested in the next content treadmill or expansion. Someone with the Basic Set of D&D or the 1e DMG for AD&D, some dice, pencil and paper have all they need for decades of play.

CRPGs

First person examples: The Wizardry series 1-8, Ultima: Stygian Abyss, King's Field series, Gold Box D&D Series, Thief, Dragon Wars, Legend of Grimlock, Akalabeth: World of Doom.

Top down or Isometric examples: The Ultima series, Baldurs Gate and all subsequent Infinity Engine games, Moonring, Undertale, Dark Heart of Uukrul, The Magic Candle, Isle of Gelnor, Phantasie 1, Final Fantasy 1, Dragon Warrior, Stone Soup, Zorbus.

Similarities:

CRPGs or “Classic RPGs” are in many ways the same mechanically to original and classic D&D. Those that like CRPGs, especially if they prefer them to AAA RPGs or action titles, are almost certainly bound to feel the same way about classic D&D if they enjoy tabletop pencil and paper adventure games. Many of them are “one for one” the same to the classic tabletop game in terms of the game's math and resolution mechanics, or barely different.

Differences:

The huge downside to many CRPGs are the restrictions on player choices and a tendency to focus on hack-and-slash game-play as well as closed exploration matrices (like dungeons). Additionally like most video games, the player is unlikely to be cooperating (or arguing) with other, real life people and in many the game focuses on a single character.

Fantasy Simulation and management games

Example: Kenshi, Factorio, Caves of Qud, Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld, Mount and Blade: Bannerlord, Spore.

Similarities:

It's been my experience that players that enjoy games like the examples listed above almost always seem to be the players that enjoy OSR tabletop games. My hypothesis is this is because these are the kinds of players that don't like walls and don't want to be led by the nose by the game. They want to make the game theirs, have curious and unexpected things happen, and would rather have a world of honest restraints that they can engage with. People who play fantasy simulations want to be surprised by and challenged by the world, and it's likely that for that reason they'll enjoy classic pencil and paper RPGs.

A story naturally emerges through the combination of unexpected elements, but it's one you want to tell your friends about, not one that is narrated to you as if it is a movie.

Differences:

As picaresque as old school RPG players are accused of being, and cruel toward their little imaginary people, fantasy simulation games usually involve an even greater distance between the player and the characters, like a “god's eye view.” Fantasy simulators often involve whole societies or groups, which is a fundamental departure from the early intention of the fantasy adventure game which revolutionized the pre-existing tabletop simulation and wargame hobbies by zooming into individual heroes.

Likewise, while the results that can come out of inputs into fantasy simulators can be vast, they are still bound by a closed system with a limited number of options, while pencil and paper adventurers can hypothetically attempt anything.

At least once!

Rogue Likes

Examples: Nethack, Castelvanias and their clones, Rogue, Telengard, Noita, Angband, Ancient Domains of Mystery.

Similarities: Rogue likes are extremely similar to a tabletop Old school game in that there is a tremendous focus on exploration and survival in a deadly environment. The feeling of tension a player has in a Rogue-like dungeon as the environment constantly threatens them and even hunts them down while they try to evade and outsmart it in order to gain treasure and power is something few video games can express that feels exactly like being in a game of Basic and Expert D&D or Original D&D. Really good Rogue-likes will include additional game-play phases such as traveling through a wilderness from adventure sites as well as game-play elements in a sanctuary.

Differences: Rogue-likes differ from OSR games often in their lack of persistent game-play, especially those rogue-like games that end the game after death or after a certain number of deaths. In a classic D&D game death is no hindrance to the campaign, at least not 1 or 2 of the characters. The campaign keeps going. Additionally, game-play is reduced in most Rogeulikes to be just exploration and combat, and like most video games it lacks the open system which enables an infinity of choices that can be attempted.

Open world sandbox fantasy exploration games (with co-op!)

Examples: Gedonia, Valheim, Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Elden Ring, Outward, Minecraft, No Man's Sky, Necesse, Book of Travels.

Similarities:

This is actually the category of game that most closely resembles what I think is the feel of OSR games or perhaps the experience I seek as a player and Referee. Games like “Elden Ring”, “Zelda: Breath of the Wild”, “Valheim”, “Minecraft” and most especially “Outward.” Some classic and retro MMOs are also like this like “Ember's Adrift” and the early days of “New World.”

Sandbox exploration games feel to me as if the world doesn't care if I'm there or not. The world feels big, there are mysteries and challenges. The story is what naturally emerges from my experiences, it isn't contrived or given via forced cut-scenes.

Differences: “A mile wide, and an inch deep.” For the average person they cannot modify the mechanics and code of even an incredibly rich physics model in a huge fantasy sandbox to finally emulate the infinite choices in reality. In a way, pencil and paper adventure games ultimately fulfill the promise of what many look for in games like Minecraft and Valheim. At any point the experience of the Referee, the ideas of the players and the permeability of the open game system can allow for choices to be made, and that's something that no video game, no matter how close, can ever provide. The infinity of human imagination.

Top ten games:

10. Pools of Radiance – Official Advanced Dungeons and Dragons computer game (1988)

Pools of Radiance and it's subsequent titles sometimes called “Gold Box” CRPG games are an excellent way to really experience the OSR directly with a few caveats.

First of all, the game itself was intended to be a direct, 1:1 simulation of the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rule-set into a computer video game. In a lot of ways it succeeds. In order to play the game, you'll need to understand things like your character's basic to hit or THACO, descending armor class, hit points and class specialties. You'll have to establish an order of march and synergize class features in dungeon combat using the AD&D combat procedures to defeat monsters. In dungeon crawling you'll have to weigh the risks and make choices about investigating certain areas in an old school tabletop “push your luck” fashion to explore and get treasure.

The Gold Box games were also legendary in that, to really play them well, you needed to have actual grid paper in front of you mapping the dungeon. This is very close to a skill set that a video game can provide that can be ported directly into the OSR game-play experience.

There are several things that hold these direct ports of classic D&D rules back from simulating OSR game-play. First of all, like most video games, doing it alone just doesn't express the game-play experience and video gamers often suffer from this when they need to learn to work as a team with other people in tabletop. It's a skill set, and one that solo video games won't provide.

Secondly, I've played some of the Gold Box games but been told there are exploits and deviations from the rules of AD&D. AD&D itself is not merely a “dungeon crawler”, and to reduce AD&D to dungeon crawling is to take a complete, fantasy simulation toolkit and take away most of what makes it so amazing. I've heard it said of AD&D that it is “greater than the sum of it's parts” and the Gold Box video games are only part of the experience.

Lastly, also like most video games, the synthetic walls and lack of an “open system” where players can attempt most things is simply not like pencil and paper RPGs at all, and you can really feel that in the Gold Box games which only offer continuous walls, floors and ceilings as far as you can explore, and only several ways to interact with the world, and only a few options to dialogue with NPCs. You really have to stretch your imagination a lot to be able to be immersed in the same way you could if you were at a tabletop with other Players and Referees.

The Gold Box AD&D games were recently released on platforms like GOG and Steam.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1882370/Pool_of_Radiance/

9. Ultima Online (1997)

Ultima Online is one of the first true “Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games”, both a continuation of the Ultima fantasy RPG series (previously mentioned as solid contenders for the experience of OSR game-play) and with persistent, simulated world, online elements via the internet.

Much like the CRPG and Fantasy Sandbox categories, many other games could easily fill this slot. Certainly, Classic World of Warcraft would be easier for a modern gamer to get into, and in my opinion it does a good job of simulating a classic OSR experience from tabletop, but Ultima Online has a few features that make it more akin to a classic pencil and paper game.

First, like all MMOs that would come after it, it has persistence, meaning that your progress in the game will continue even when you leave and can be seen by others. In some ways, the actions you take in the world affect the world itself and you can make an impact on what happens to other players. Many people who first tried D&D will note that persistent game elements such as levels were what made the game revolutionary for them. This is true of all MMOs, but the designers of Ultima Online sought for the game world to be a fantasy simulation, even going so far to create realistic models of how animals in the wild would reproduce and populate (though they would encounter the reason why such fantasy simulations need to be a game first when the local wildlife were over run and exterminated by murder hoboing players.)

Ultima Online also worked as a social and economic experiment, and at points the developers would try to allow players to simply interact with the world and discover the results of their actions without interference. This would change over time, but the ability to simply interact with the world in this way is very close to what an OSR game is like.

Lastly, you can still play Ultima Online today and it hosts one of the most vibrant role-playing communities in MMOs. By role-playing I mean taking on the roles of characters and playing them out honestly, not just play acting or creating narratives. For that reason, a player today can experience something pretty close to an old school pencil and paper game in Ultima Online, unlike other MMOs that have leaned away from simulation and toward the game treadmill.

Ultimate Online is still active after approaching 30 years soon and available for free online!

https://uo.com/

8. Darkest Dungeon

Darkest Dungeon bills itself as a rogue-like, but it works similar to games like “Final Fantasy” in that you have a 2d platform array of characters that work together against an opposing force. You have to manage their sanity, equipment and talents to defeat horrors and explore a Lovecraftian themed Gothic estate.

Apart from it's Lovecraftian Horror and Sword and Sorcery influences which more strongly resemble classic D&D's edge and attitude than the modern game, Darkest Dungeon has a lot mechanically in common with classic D&D. First, you have a team of characters which must synergize their efforts in order to overcome challenges that would be more than a match for any single one of them. Item and resource management is important, and it takes a thoughtful and clever approach to conflict in order to win. Darkest Dungeon won't tell you that you are a hero, it won't make you a hero, you either are one, or you aren't.

The horror themes also do it some favors to resemble an OSR tabletop experience, and the trips back to a sanctuary to role-play, interact with NPCs and re-equip.

https://www.darkestdungeon.com/

7. Baldur's Gate 1

In Baldur's Gate you take on the role of a single character you design but directly command a group of other characters top down or “isometric” to a hand-painted map in set locations. Encounters will happen randomly, some handcrafted others random but relative to what is happening in the world. Like all “Infinity Engine” games that would follow it, the dialogue and quest trees are mind blowing in a seemingly infinite number of branches of options based on choices, making it feel more like a tabletop RPG than almost anything that has come before or since.

Borrowing from the CRPG list the Isometric masterpiece that is Baldur's Gate 1 is an easy shoe-in as a contender for replicating the experience of B/X or Original D&D away from the table because it's game mechanics are directly 2^nd Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. While 2e is often the red headed step child of the OSR and has some significant cultural and mechanical differences from 1e, B/X/BECMI or OD&D, it is still the same game in essence with THACO, encumbrance, save vs. dragon's breath and thief skills, etc.

In a lot of ways, if you have never played classic D&D, Baldur's Gate 1 will serve well to train the solo player. This could be said of many of the other CRPGs certainly mentioned above, but Baldur's Gate 1 is about the right point to experience OSR game-play because of it's open ended sandbox, non-linear storytelling and game-play loop of leaving a sanctuary, fighting or evading wilderness random encounters and hack and slashing your way through a dungeon and taking their stuff back to sell it and resurrect your dead buddy at the temple. It's sequel would master the narration and storytelling 2e sought to achieve and so would depart some from this formula, and later entries like Icewind Dale would prove more linear and gamist.

I remember playing Baldur's Gate 1 and adventuring at a castle with my party. I had cleared most of one floor and there was a door leading into a temple area that had been ruined. Within sat a troll, and there I learned something about a classic D&D monster, it regenerates! The thing wiped the floor with my party a couple of times and I had to reload (Obviously a major departure from the OSR experience obviously, the ability to go back and retry things.)

I remember enjoying sitting for about an hour of game-play straight as I prepared my marching order, who would strike first and with what weapon, where the spell-casters would be and their stack of spells. I prepared the party with spells like “bless” and charged in after long preparation. In the back my spell-casters started with things like “sanctuary” and we tried “dispel magic” etc. which didn't work against the troll, but I didn't know how to defeat it at the time. The thieves stood well back and then angled for an attempt at a back-stab.

The fighters held their ground long enough to receive healing spells and then I cycled between magic missile and other offensive spells before finally trying some fire arrows. It didn't regenerate! After a long fought battle the thing lay dead on the temple floor and many of my adventurers only had several hit points. Warily, I took what treasure I could and made the trek through the wilderness hoping I wouldn't have a bandit ambush to get back to a nearby town for healing and the sale of treasure.

Experiences like that really feel like the OSR, and the mechanics are very close to the real thing.

6. Kenshi

“You are not the chosen one. You are not great and powerful. You don't have more 'hit points' than everyone else. You are not the centre of the universe, you are not special. Unless you work for it.”

The website's description of Kenshi almost sounds like an OSR tabletop game! It also bills itself as an open world experience with no pre-set plot where you can choose to become whatever you want. “...game-play is free-roaming and open: enjoy the freedom and potential to do whatever you want.”

Kenshi is something very difficult to explain, and it shares this inexplicable quality with a good OSR game. A good OSR game will consist of some “truths about the world” which might include procedures and random tables. When this sauce is mixed with player's that have a bent toward “shenanigans” what results are some truly bizarre, and sometimes hilarious outcomes.

I have always said that classic D&D is “pro shenanigans.” Often times modern D&D suffered under the weight of heroes with great abilities. Like it or not, 'shenanigans' begin to make less and less sense when you are the one who can bring salvation to a world that needs heroes. Kenshi doesn't offer you that unless you seize it. Even then, what compromises will you make to get there?

Honorable mention to “Caves of Qud” which I had wanted to include, but found that I was really including it for the same reason I was going to mention Kenshi. As mentioned above a close medieval fantasy game to this weird-fiction might be “Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord” which I'd also highly recommend.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/233860/Kenshi/

5. Valheim

You are a Viking who has been slain in battle and carried into the afterlife of the tenth world. Here is a wild, open wilderness of forgotten and lost civilizations, strange monsters, magical powers and perhaps most importantly, fellow adventuring vikings who must strap on axes, spears, shields and bows and make plans to cross deadly forests to sites of adventure for treasure.

Valheim is one of the typical “survival” games common in indie video games today. Survival games that have an emphasis on co-op multiplayer with lower fantasy, high lethality/lower character power and exploration are strong contenders for conveying the OSR tabletop game experience.

For reasons similar to my #1 choice, Valheim delivers a sense of danger that requires a thoughtful approach, or the acceptance of glorious death if rushing headlong against otherworldly monsters and into infested cairns. Add to that a grand open world to explore and you get really close to what an OSR game feels like when you play it with other people.

I remember building boats with my friends so that we could set upon a sea journey to a faraway turtle isle (an actual turtle) to gather components for powerful armor, and along the way we were attacked by a powerful sea serpent and barely survived, then after crashing due to a storm on a faraway shore we encountered a bizarre merchant who had wares we could not yet afford and would need to make plans in the future to obtain. None of that was pre-scripted by the game, it just arose from our choices in the world.

Or when I adventured with my wife and we traveled along the coast gathering flint while fighting off monsters, darkness fell and we couldn't make it back. As I was consumed by the undead she climbed to the top of a crumbling, ancient stone tower to await the sunrise to take what goods she could from the body of her fallen husband and hoped to make it back to our sanctuary alive.

These are just like OSR encounters and game-play experiences, and if you like Old School tabletop I highly recommend Valheim!

https://www.valheimgame.com/

4. Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall

Daggerfall is one of the greatest RPG video games of all time, and to this day hosts one of the largest game worlds ever created, still dwarfing it's later sequels in the “Elder Scrolls” series. It accomplishes this by procedurally generating the connective tissue between adventure sites and some of the game world elements, but still has a mind-bending amount of hand crafted content and quests. In Daggerfall you are sent by the Emperor of Tamriel to the lands of Daggerfall to...well who knows or cares really?

It's actually a simulated fantasy world where if you get in trouble at the local tavern you get a court date and maybe a jail sentence. You can immerse yourself trying to get coin between towns by selling your sword to the local wench who has a disagreement with one of the land owners, or perhaps she has a pet bear and needs you to take it for a walk for a week while she travels.

I could easily have included anything from the CRPG that's first person here, but in my opinion Daggerfall tops the list because of it's open ended nature and freedom from strict procedures and rules. It achieves being a fantasy world simulation for you to do whatever you want.

There is a story you can follow and quests, and the world will continue on and change if the player never intervenes. Just as easily you can become a roof top hopping catpurse, or a sworn Holy Knight of one of multiple knightly orders, or you can take out a several million Septim loan from a bank and disappear with the money to purchase a giant pirate ship and hire a crew to sail to faraway lands.

Daggerfall, especially with recent mods, allows the player to simply walk in a direction and find adventure but with a significant difference from future Elder Scrolls titles, the world doesn't revolve around the player, it's just there. Master it, fall to it, ignore it. The world doesn't try to make you out to be the messiah or guide you back to curated content (except that quest lines actually expire as time passes). Elder Scrolls and other modern fantasy RPGs have strayed farther and farther from this in ways similar to the modern tabletop game. Nowadays following a stray dog in a modern Elder Scrolls title will see you contending face to face with a god instead of more gritty, sword and sorcery fare.

With recent quality of life mods and overhauls like Daggerfall Unity, this ancient classic RPG is seeing new players discover it's seemingly endless world for the first time. Daggerfall could easily sit at #1 on this list because it is perhaps the master of video games that extol player agency. It only doesn't because it misses the crucial pillar of cooperating with other players, a major departure from the OSR experience.

https://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/1812390/

https://www.dfworkshop.net/

3. Grim Quest

You are a mercenary from the crumbling Gothic city of Ashborne who prowls the wastes outside fighting or evading monsters, negotiating with otherworldly things, scrying magical runes from antediluvian stones and gathering treasure.

If you play OSR tabletop games you might think I just described one! Grim Quest is so “on the nose” about being a video game port of Old School tabletop gaming that it directly calls itself an “Old School RPG” so you know exactly what you are in for.

The mood, the vibe, the dungeon synth in the background, the artwork, all of it is just like an OSR game. To be honest if you watch some of my actual plays on our channel...they kind of look like this but with a group of people.

To go further, this game is an OSR solo procedure crawl on your phone (also available on PC via Steam). If you want to see what an OSR game is about but only have 5 minutes, the app is free. If you love OSR games and want something to put you in the OSR mood, you should totally have this game on your phone. If nothing else, support the creator who clearly has a love of old school D&D.

It suffers from the limitations of other classic RPGs mentioned before, unlike the infinite weirdness that fractals out of an OSR campaign. But if your imagination can operate within the walls of a CRPG, you'll gain a sense of what an OSR game feels like with this mobile app alone.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1918130/Grim_Quest__Old_School_RPG/

2. Dark and Darker

Dark and Darker takes the extraction shooter game formula and places you into a tattered cowl and linen tunic and hands you a short-sword or bow. You begin organizing with others online or friends in a tavern then can hop around and test your equipment in the loading space among all the players before being placed in a near picture perfect example of a classic D&D dungeon. Your goal in said dungeon is to evade traps and monsters and find treasure to bring back to the tavern to build up over time while dealing with the fact that groups of other adventurers are also there in the dungeon looking for the same loot, all while the 'bubble' of available space shrinks until only those who have either conquered the map or escaped will survive.

It's no mistake that its name forms “D and D” and it's clear that not only did the creators of it love D&D, but they must have loved the classic version of the game in particular with humans only, a strictly medieval fantasy grounded aesthetic and obscure and unreliable magic wielded only by specialists. It's easy to mention the parts of this game that don't capture classic D&D, and it's simply that there is no sanctuary game-play, no estate and no wilderness. If it had those things it would easily top this list, but alas, the only two parts to this game are negotiating with potential hirelings (other players) in town and buying and selling from merchants, then it's straight into the dungeon to get the loot and try to make it back alive.

The dungeon on the other hand is basically a 1 for 1 expression of classic D&D dungeon mechanics except in real time. Just like in OD&D or in B/X, if you mess around in a room and get too greedy trying to inspect for secret passages, disarming traps, overcoming puzzles or trying to bypass the lock on a treasure chest, danger will find you in the form of roaming rival adventure parties (other players) as well as groups of monsters.

The game has the shrinking blue bubble common in battle royale or extraction shooter games but in this game you have all the classic D&D types of classes like clerics, magic users and warriors. Weapons include 1:1 equivalents from classic D&D like different medieval ranged weapons, spells, and even two handed and pole-arm weapons vs. shorter range melee options. The environment is sometimes destructible and “Jacqauyed” in such a way that teams of players can problem solve and think to try and avoid encounters or use the environment to their advantage. That game leaves it to the players to decide if the intense lethality of combat is desirable, or more circumspection is warranted. Sometimes avoiding encounters as much as possible is the best solution, then dropping in for a Thief-y grab of some well sought treasure before diving for the portal out.

The combination of teamwork, the fear and tension of the dungeon, the almost perfect sword and sorcery aesthetic, the lethality, the dependence on problem solving, and the open ended nature of how the game allows you to approach the dungeon and situations is almost perfectly like an OSR dungeon crawl. If you like OSR games and video games, this is a must-buy.

https://www.darkanddarker.com/

1. Outward

In Outward you and possibly one other friend must explore and survive in a huge, fantasy open world. You'll need to gather materials and treasure to build your kit over time and approach the possibility of combat and environmental hazards with the knowledge that the game automatically saves regardless of what has happens, meaning you don't get to pick and choose the endings and outcomes you want.

If you are felled in combat you might be dragged off by a group of bandits and ransomed as a slave or appear in a wolves den bloody, mangled and miles away from your equipment. The world though is beautiful, thoughtful, and honest. It doesn't seek to kill you it's just there, for you to explore and do with what you will. You can take things slowly and carefully and focus on interacting with NPCs at settlements while doing short loops into nearby adventure sites, or risk it all making your pack heavy and traveling to a faraway country on foot.

Outward is my #1 recommendation for capturing the feel of an old school tabletop role-playing game with 1 caveat: you should play this with a friend. The sense of cooperation, managing your equipment and load, the completely open ended world that on one hand doesn't try to explain itself or condescend to you and yet you can also master it, the feeling of danger, adventure, exploration, mystery and challenge, Outward has all these things. If I could never play a pencil and paper RPG again, I think this is the sort of game I'd go to in order to have the feel of fantasy adventure.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/794260/Outward_Definitive_Edition/

Conclusion

So there you have it! No video game can ever replicate the infinite imagination of tabletop pencil and paper adventure games but some can express some of the “feel” or “style” to enjoy or relate the experience a bit.

Hopefully if you are deep into the gronardiest corners of the OSR and are looking for something between games to have fun with this article has provided you some ideas. And if you are either curious about the OSR or are looking for common touchstones to discuss it with friends this list will help.

Special thanks to the following Facebook OSR communities: Dungeoncraft, OSR – Old School Roleplaying, TTRPG Community, . Discord OSR communities: Mythic Mountains RPG: Folk RPG HQ, Classic Adventure Gaming Podcast, OD&D – Discussion Board, Don't Split the Party, Mythmere Games, Mold School Games, Autarch, OSR Pick-up Games, TTRPG Community, Clerics war Ringmail, Free Kriegspeil Revolution (The Original FKR server), Tenkar's Tavern, Questing Beast, The Arcane Library.

Special thanks to Stripe from OSR Pick-up Games who gave really thoughtful examples.

What is DCC?

Often times people will ask “What is unique about Dungeon Crawl Classics?” I usually point out that Goodman Games has put that right up front on one of the first pages of the book.

Dungeon Crawl Classics is a modern RPG with some old school art and attitude that is simple and fun to play.

It's:

• a pseudo-retro-old school D&D formula

• a modern game

• inspired by the magic and combat of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay

• inspired by the archetypal classes of Basic and Expert D&D

• Uses an excellent unified D20 formula but with a larger dice chain than regular D&D

• Is oozing with flavor and attitude.

The key thing I want to express about Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC for short) in this blog is to understand it

it's much less about it's game mechanics and much more about it's “attitude.”

I believe this is the key to understanding and enjoying DCC to it's fullest.

What is the “Dungeon Crawl Classics attitude?”

DCC is self-deprecating, self-referential and often full of satire about old school gaming culture and attitudes. It comes from the 4e days when Goodman Games were already publishing adventures under the D20 license before they released their own system. They would begin such adventures with a musing like:

“Remember the good old days, when adventures were underground, NPCs were there to be killed, and the finale of every dungeon was the dragon on the 20th level? Those days are back. Dungeon Crawl Classics adventures don’t waste your time with long-winded speeches, weird campaign settings, or NPCs who aren’t meant to be killed. Each adventure is 100% good, solid dungeon crawl, with the monsters you know, the traps you remember, and the secret doors you know are there somewhere.”

(Sailors on the Starless Sea 2012 Goodman Games by Harley Stroh)

It's clear that the original wave of OSR godfathers were keenly aware that they carried a bitterness toward the modern game.

This “punk attitude”, or “rebel spirit” toward the modern playstyle and culture wouldn't just stay a simmering resentment nor a triumphalism with the victory they held in the renaissance of old school gaming. The game both has something important to say, but also doesn’t take itself seriously. Poking fun at their own overly sanctimonious pretensions about “how the game should be” would become a constant joke in the pages of DCC.

This humor and punk spirit would be turned up to an “11” in the pages of Dungeon Crawl Classics in 2011. It would grow wild along with it's community and artwork. It’s not enough to just display hapless villagers holding chickens in the dark against eldritch alien monstrosities for which they have no chance of survival or even sanity. Heroes would be shown with ‘fro's’, bell bottoms and rhinestone encrusted levi jackets.

This spirit is infectious. Goodman Games enlists the help of super passionate fans that carry this attitude to in person game stores and the zine culture both on their website, fan communities and their “Road crew.”

Dungeon Crawl Classics doesn't stay limited to just attempting to recreate a vibe from the original game, but embraces the satire of a time that never actually was. It is a “pseudo-history” of retro-D&D culture. It doesn't just borrow from the holy texts of Appendix N (though it does that heavily) but also from Saturday morning cartoons from the 80’s and other pop culture from the 70's.

This might make Dungeon Crawl Classics sound “gimmicky” like a “one off” game to try but certainly not durable for long campaigns or years of investment. However, there are other things about the game that have made it one of the top tabletop RPGs that many people have enjoyed for over a decade and continue with no end in sight.

First the design of the game, while having this pseudo-retro veneer on the front of it, has some really deep things to say in it’s actual pages by some of the best designers in the industry. It becomes not just a statement about the “old school reaction” but something that moves the hobby forward. DCC adventures and products are made by some of the greatest geniuses for how adventures and tabletop RPG gaming works, regardless of the game.

People like Brendan LaSalle, Chris Doyle, Harley Stroh, Michael Curtis and Joseph Goodman himself.

Serious things said about game design in the book:

1. Magic can be truly dangerous and mysterious and you can still roll dice and have fun with it - Dungeon Crawl Classics subverts the D&D Vancian Magic “spell slot” formula. You can cast magic as much as you want, but you always contend with that magic as something that you can lose control over. This doesn’t mean you can’t reliably roll dice though, and it’s always fun to do. I have found misfires and mutations to be so rare that as a spellcaster, I actually looked forward to them coming up. Add to that mercurial effects to magic that make spells weird and unique to each spellcaster as well as manifestations, and usually people have been on the edge of their seat waiting to see what wacky thing happens every time the wizard or elf casts a spell.

2. Fighters can be unique and interesting - Fighters have the reputation of being boring, and that ends with Dungeon Crawl Classics. Fighters in DCC can declare a mighty deed whenever they attack. Some of these I’ve experienced have been landing on a titan from a 40 ft leap and driving a magic spear through their brain and doing an over-the-shoulder, anime, “cool guys don’t look back” underbelly gutting of a fledgling frog god.

3. A medieval fantasy world can be full of wonder and exploration because of it's restraints

   

4. Every element of the game can drive adventure. A restraint in the world or obstacle is always an opportunity for more adventure.

   

   A great chant arises from the DCC community when you ask how to accomplish something in the game. How do you become more powerful? How do you identify magic items? Learn new spells? Accomplish deeds and goals in the world? What makes your character unique?

   Quest for it!

   Dungeon Crawl Classics has lead people back to one of the most important elements lost in modern Dungeons and Dragons. From lists of skills, feats and prestige classes that sometimes feel like doing taxes, characters return to adventure in the fiction. This would go on to be one of the central pillars of indie and OSR gaming we have today.

5. The world is made mysterious and vast when even common monsters are tweaked in unexpected ways and expectations subverted.

   Much of the chonky tome that is Dungeon Crawl Classics are just optional tools for Judges (which can be used to great effect in other games by the way!)

   Dungeon Crawl Classics suggests that no magic sword should exist as simply “Magic Sword +1.” It should have a name, a personality, a history. It should be complicated and invite further mystery, investigation and adventure. Perhaps most importantly, you should rarely hear in a Dungeon Crawl Classics game “You see three Orcs.”

   Yes, you can describe Orcs instead of simply saying what they are, but better than that, what if they Orcs were infected with a corruption from the Tree-god Yddgrl and sprouted tentacle vines and multiple eyes? Monsters in Dungeon Crawl Classics are uncomfortable chimeras, horrifying wonders, never merely a commonly known archetype fitting neatly into a compartment of well-established expectations.

The second thing that makes Dungeon Crawl Classics an evergreen tabletop experience is the community.

The freedom to be silly with this “pseudo-retro-ism” has encouraged the community to keep exploding in a fractal of chaos as if the multiverse has ripped open a vortex of madness, and the mad sorcerers of Goodman Games laugh as they encourage the tendrils of this chaos to spread and grow.

DCC is no longer limited to medieval euro-centric fantasy adventuring of classic D&D, but has spiraled into every conceivable genre and trope and thread of it’s pseudo-retro era.

Entire giant box sets that are some of the most “full” box sets you can find in the industry that cover the holy texts of Appendix N including “Peril on the Purple Planet”, “DCC Lankhmar” and recently “Dying Earth”

There’s even a whole different version of the game for weird, post apocalyptic adventures: “Mutant Crawl Classics”

There’s probably an entire lifetime of fun to be had just playing content for Dungeon Crawl Classics, and the pace of content creation doesn’t seem to be slowing down.

The actual business of “Goodman Games”, the owners and creators of Dungeon Crawl Classics, is a large part of the game’s success. Goodman Games has a grassroots, “gamer first” business model. They've basically held an opposite approach not just to modern gaming in the pages of DCC, but also modern gaming business practices (opposite a company that rhymes with SCHWOTC).

I once purchased a DCC hardcover that had misprints in it and contacted their customer service. One of their folks got back to me immediately and sent me a new book right away, they requested I send them the misprint after the fact. I got a new book really fast, and they were kind. I felt like they were on my side.

Not only is the relationship between Goodman Games and their fans superb, but the quality of their books is amazing also.

I have tried my best to wear out the DCC core book I have this year, playing in multiple games as I’ve mentioned, but the tome is beautifully stitch bound and shows no signs of falling apart. It’s hard cover and has 3 ribbons for bookmarks.

The adventures are often quite cheap too. I can usually get an adventure lasting several weeks of fun for about ten bucks when I order directly from Goodman-games.com. My friendly local gamestore claims to enjoy working with them also, and I’ve gotten probably half my DCC products from game stores.

It’s also worth noting anytime you purchase anything physical you always get a code for a soft copy pdf also, unlike other certain companies from recent years.

Goodman Games supports and highlights third party content creators for their games and hosts events like RPG Free day, the DCC Roadshow, Free DCC day and other events.

Misconceptions

More than most tabletop RPGs I’ve ever played, people carry a lot of misconceptions about Dungeon Crawl Classics, often keeping them from trying it out when it might be the game for them. Here are some misconceptions I often hear that are false:

1. The “funky” dice are expensive, hard to get and mandatory for play – I love the Zocchi dice! They are a lot of fun to use when they come into play and add even more attitude and flavor to the game.

Perhaps 50% of all complaints I hear about DCC are “I don't have any funky dice and can't afford them, so I guess I can't play it.”

This is simply untrue.

The Zocchi dice are a lot of fun...but I haven't even found them essential to the game.

A D6 can act as a D3 and the D14 isn't often (or in my experience hardly ever) used at Levels 0-3. You can enjoy and try out DCC with normal D&D dice, they aren't crucial to the formula at early levels. Once you get around level 3 (which can take a long time in DCC) if you are still enjoying the game, funky dice are available online for $10 bucks.

2. The book is too expensive and hard to get.

Like most great RPGs and RPG companies, you can try DCC right now, completely for free.

Dungeon Crawl Classics Quick Start Rules

Those quick start rules will cover most of the very best adventures and could last for months with a sandbox campaign.

The book itself is far better in quality and content, is available in many game stores and ships quickly in the US from Goodman-games.com, and yet it’s cheaper than just the player’s handbook for the “modern” game, nevermind the whole game set.

3. The book is gigantic! It has too many rules and it is too complicated. Tables, yuck!

The book is big. But it also includes the whole game in one tome, everything from spells to magic items, to monsters to optional tools.

The actual rules of DCC are about 12 pages that you need to know, not including your character class. And each class is maybe 1-2 pages. If you are familiar with Dungeons and Dragons and modern RPGS, most of it you are already know.

The bulk of the book consists of two things: weird spells and weird tools for Judges (the term for Game masters in DCC).

The weird spells are not “tables” to memorize and abide by. This is a misunderstanding of how spells in DCC work. To use the spell in DCC you'll need the table, but you only need two things: your spell bonus (which is usually just your level and your attribute bonus), and a single sentence description to know the spell. Spells in DCC are actually really simple.

You roll your D20 “action die” and add your two bonuses and simply run your finger along the row to the result and read the unbelievably cool spell description you'll get.

Some things I’ve seen happen with DCC magic recently:

• After healing someone of a fleshrot, their skin sloughed off them leaving only the mark of my god on them.

• A duplicate head of a person burst from their chest and belched gouts of flames incinerating their enemies.

• On a miscast the wizard’s attempt at ventriloquism went awry permanently placing their voice 20 feet above their head.

• A player summoned a tornado to subdue mutated, drug fueled monster-dogs and the power of the spell caused them to transform into an avatar of their snake-god.

• An elf canceled a spell because it angered some villagers (he summoned a demonic frog for a horse race as his chosen steed) but just after he canceled the spell an actual demon invasion billowed from a crack in the earth. Finding ourselves unprepared I traveled back in time at the behest of the King of Elfland, warned my friend not to cancel his summon, we instead enlarged the demonic frog to giant proportions and rode it into battle sending the demon army into a rout.

Admittedly, you'll also need two more pages book marked, but trust me it's worth it!

You'll need the fumble table and the crit table. Those are close together, and you only the chart that applies to you. Goodman Games puts 3 ribbons in the book to perfectly bookmark exactly the 3 things you need to play.

You won't go there often, but when you do roll a “1” or a “20” you'll have a memorable time and almost invariably get excited to go see what the tables will give you!

The cleric is admittedly more complicated, but still not as complicated as much of the modern D&D game.

Playing a warrior is simple and fast in DCC and someone who has never played the game before will have an awesome time.

There are also some interesting options regarding things like spell mutations, spell duels and patrons but I don't see them as essential to the game, nor are they things that come up frequently.

4. The game sounds brutalizing towards players and a death fetish. A funnel where you just kill a bunch of characters? Have you talked to your therapist about this?

If you just really, really hate the funnel, it's simply not required to enjoy DCC. Funnels add a lot of fun to DCC and I recommend them, but they are in no way representative of the actual game at level 1.

The other misconception is that the brutality of the game makes it unplayable or only for those who enjoy the death of characters. Compared to the modern game, this is an obviously an unfair comparison. By any measure 5e is just not a lethal tabletop RPG. So let's compare DCC with things like “Call of Cthulu”, “Mork Borg” and classic, vintage D&D.

Comparing DCC to games like “Call of Cthulu” or “Old School Essentials”, DCC is nearly a superhero game by comparison. The “goldilocks zone” for low level adventure play in DCC is about levels 1-2 for old school play. The game goes to ten and it's uncommon for adventurers to climb very high. But even by level 3 the power level is considerable.

DCC has an unfair reputation for being a meat grinder, and it owes that more to it’s aesthetic and attitude than mechanics.

How it actually plays

Dungeon Crawl Classics is fast and cinematic for the first 4 levels (which if you go by the book you probably won't exceed anytime soon), has lots of fun unique options for characters, and if you carry the attitude of the game, it's basically always a blast.

Check out our Youtube Actual Play series of Dungeon Crawl Classics including many of the major adventure modules from Goodman Games!

• It's extremely easy to learn and begin playing. For a funnel and level 1 you can start playing right away with no experience.

• It provides a huge array of options for sword and sorcery weirdness and Appendix N inspired roleplaying entertainment.

• It's amazing for both published linear games that are popular in the DCC community, as well as sprawling open ended, homebrew sandboxes.

What Dungeon Crawl Classics isn’t great at

DCC is something specific. It’s a fast, gonzo, pseudo-retro, party with some modern D&D to it.

It isn't good at things outside of that specialty.

We've tried using DCC for old school modules and modern adventures. It can do it, but it struggles.

One of the reasons for this is DCC has wild results from magic and combat. People can experience permanent injuries and mutations that carry on for the rest of the game.

In the example I gave for the wizard casting his voice 20 feet above his head, that was in the new OSR module “The Secret of the Black Crag.” Earlier the same wizard killed almost half the party on a miscast in a dungeon. The tools for characters are so beefy and violent that we often used violence as a tool in a sandbox module designed for exploration and old school D&D which discourages combat.

In the the example I gave about riding the demonic frog into battle, enlarging summoned demons and pets became a “go to” tactic to solve problems in the 2e AD&D setting “Planescape” causing the game to take on a goofy, cartoonish vibe (even though still fun!)

Both Judges found they needed to start considering “balancing” and houseruling the game more to make it work in more grounded and general adventures. It added stress and work, and a bit of dissonance to the gameplay at times.

Some will say that DCC Lankhmar fixes this. I disagree, I've tried it. DCC Lankhmar also has something specific to say and offer. With it's use of alcohol to overcome injuries, seeing sawbones doctors in dirty streets and it's carousing tables, DCC Lankhmar is providing the true Fritz Lieber experience. That is awesome, but general kitchen sink D&D it is not.

If you want a replacement for modern D&D I don't think DCC is it, unless you like what it specifically gives with it's attitude and style.

For me, the game that is more grounded and generalized that takes a lot of the tools and charm from Dungeon Crawl Classics and can replace modern D&D is Shadowdark RPG, which I'll be reviewing later.

A Recommendation

If you are going to try DCC, try a funnel but try a level 1 adventure at least – Funnels are a ton of fun and amazing. My original failed start in DCC was playing in a funnel and then getting a wrong impression. Funnels have a vibe similar to “Mork Borg” where they are very lethal and very quick. I do think they make the best basis for investment in the surviving adventurers, and the published funnels are really great.

But if you play a funnel you have not actually experienced Dungeon Crawl Classics as it truly is.

When you start adventuring at level 1 in DCC it's a quite different game than at level 0. You'll get to enjoy the magic system, the cool features of thieves, halflings, cleric's relationship with the eternal struggle and perhaps best of all, mighty deeds!

My suggestion is to try a funnel and then a level 1 adventure right after if you want a “tasting”.

If you want to get even more excited about Dungeon Crawl Classics here are some channels and content creators to stoke your excitement!

1. Jorphdan’s Jocular Junction:

2. Bob the World Builder:

3. Dungeoncraft:

4. Wasabiburger:

Summary

I highly recommend Dungeon Crawl Classics! The Quick Start Rules are free and include sample adventures, and I don’t think I’ve ever played DCC and not had fun.

We lost a player today and I don't know what to do.

I met John because he found us. John suffered from MS, so like a lot of us, he was driven to enjoy his hobbies on the internet. Unfortunately, John was a traditional person. And so he wasn't welcome in many places in the hobbies he enjoyed online. John has never once, not once that I know of, said an unkind word about anyone, and never deserved that. Thank God, that's how he found Saga Society and we became friends. I am angry that the internet can be such a hateful place. But one of the best things that hatred caused was for me to find John. He said he felt like he had found a home with us and we got to talk nearly every day sharing the thing we loved together.

Not only did we become friends but we went on an amazing journey together. John played the Dwarf Nabbi in our six month long "The Heroes Journey" legendarium where he, another Dwarf, an Elven Wizard and two Hobbits were on a journey to destroy a cursed sword.

Along the way he negotiated with the Queen of the Winter Court of Fairies, won the prized dragon smoking pipe of Grigory Goldleaf in a tobacco smoking contest, saved a Hobbit child from a malicious Fey, negotiated with a Goblin army to steal a gem from a dragon hoard, brought peace between a Forest Troll and a Tavernkeep, and would finally stand his ground against the Cursed Midnight Rider of Loch Dearmod long enough for the Hobbit to destroy the blade. It was a campaign I'll never forget.

John would then find his way to Mythic Mountains and that's where he'd take on all sorts of roles and we'd even play together as players. He became one of the main players as the Cleric Kayden in my long running Swords & Wizardry campaign, where he helped to defend the little village of Zelkor's Ferry against the predations of the monsters of Chaos that burble up from the cursed Rappan Athuk. Kayden became one of the greatest heroes of that world that has seen nearly 60 players and ran for over 2 years.

John and I, funny enough, would disagree a lot although perhaps silently. I have a lot of "artistic" opinions about how tabletop RPGs should go. I think John just wanted to have a fun time with friends, and feel cool and powerful doing so. We actually butted heads on that, but I still liked him as a player. I could tell John was a hot blooded man, and probably several times a session he'd stop himself from saying something. John never once said an unkind thing to any of us, it never happened. I have come to covet the manly grace and restraint John held as a virtue. I'm mad I won't get to continue to learn from him.

I am angry that John never recovered and enjoyed the dreams he shared with us. He was a devout Christian man and wanted to be a Father and a Husband. He wanted to write children's stories. He will never get to do those things and it angers me.

John was mostly immobile when I knew him, but I still complained and shared about my own disability and my pain. I don't feel self conscious about this because John always was compassionate. In a way he was a trusted guide since it was something he had dealt with to a greater degree for a longer time. John constantly checked on me, constantly expressed concern and love. He was a fountain of compassion and love for other people.

I have been John's friend for about a year and we got to talk almost everyday. He was one of the greatest blessings God gave me during this time of physical pain, and he was one of my closest companions on our many adventures in the fantasy worlds of pencil, paper and shared imagination. We climbed mystic, winding mountains together, opened doorways between planes of existences, fought villains in righteous battle and strapped into starships on daring escapes and trade runs between planets.

I will never stop hurting that I won't get to hear John's voice again. And I don't want to. I want to remember him everyday until I can hear him again because I love him.

If anyone has experience having lost a player, I appreciate your experience. I write this blog because I have strong opinions and so much joy for tabletop RPGs. But I have no opinions or experience on this.

I hurt, I love you John and I miss you.

As new referees and players enter the Old School Renaissance hobby, we are beginning to ask questions about the purpose of many of the relics and artifacts left behind from those days.

Many of the things in Old School games seem vestigial to modern gamers, but in the context of certain styles of play, they can add a lot to a game.

Level titles still being included in new games

"Shadowdark" is a modern RPG with old school attitude. It's capturing a lot of attention right now, and there’s a bit of a marketing blitz for the Kickstarter. It is even capturing the attention of an audience less familiar with old school games.

Shadowdark Quickstart rules and Kickstarter link

Kelsey Dionne, the designer of Shadowdark RPG, has emphasized that a lot of fun can be had from the system by leaning into Shadowdark's old school vibes. Shadowdark mantains an interesting artifact from the origins of the game for example: level titles.

Kelsey Dionne explaining level titles in Shadowdark

Kelsey explains that titles can be used to provide access to new opportunities for characters that wouldn't have them. In this way, titles work the same as honorifics, ranks and titles just like in our real world, as I'll explain later.

But if they serve as a kind of "gate" or barrier to opportunities, why use them at all? Does a character recieve them automatically when they level?

This blog article is my attempt to research and present this subject in more depth, and provide some suggestions on how level titles could be a fun addition to certain kinds of campaigns.

What are level titles?

From Original D&D until 2nd Edition AD&D every class in Dungeons and Dragons was bestowed a "title" when levelling up. This comes from two aspects in "Chainmail."

1. A medieval society - All characters are assumed to fit in a social heirarchy of the medieval world, which granted titles and positions in a class structure.

2. Heroes of a fantasy world - titles served as an identifier for how heroic and powerful a character was apart from just "Fighting-man Level 2." Heroic characters could take on greater challenges and threats than non-heroic ones.

Titles in the context of modern RPGs and society

A normal part of social order, still used today - Honorifics and titles are still an important part of our daily lives, even a matter of ecclesial, government and trade authority not that different than the medieval world. Today, if someone can use the title "Doctor" their word will be trusted as a matter of authority, based in their reputation, past achievement and certification.

Regardless of your setting's connection to the medieval world, titles ranks and honorifics can be an important part of social order and create a framework for adventuring goals and quests, just like they do in the real world.

Ecclessial titles such as the "Most Reverend" or "Archbishop" are still in use and convey authority and trust as well. For members of the military, they must obey and render respect to persons of higher rank. Today we still live in a world of titles.

For this reason, if you want to establish a medical fellowship, you'd have a much better chance as an MD. If you want to teach at a university, you'll have a much better chance with a PHD. Trying to do these things without titles is very difficult if not impossible. It makes sense that you’d have a much better shot of establishing a castle of mercenaries at level 9 as a fighter if you have been granted the title “Lord” by a King.

The ancient world and titles - Modern people often think of titles of nobility such as "Baron" and "Lord" but medieval peoples held titles in a number of ways.

For a person in the medieval world, their group identity was one of the most central aspects of their lives.

Professor Dungeon Master explains why Clerics in his game answer to a heirarcy and group identity

This can be difficult for cynical, post-modern (or later) RPG gamers who balk at the idea of a heirarchical and group-based social structure. But in the medieval world you weren't just "Bob Smith" you were "Bob of Ohio, Dentist." We still often sign and notarize things in a similar fashion, emphasizing that we are a person of a place that does a thing.

There is a mythical anthropology to this sense of "a person, of a place, of a thing", somewhat lost to modern people. But Dungeons and Dragons is certainly a game about mythical “people in places, doing things.”

Origin in Chainmail and OD&D - The use of titles as an RPG mechanic for D&D began with Chainmail. A heroic character in the miniatures wargame wouldn't just be a higher "level”, they'd carry a title, which allowed them to do greater deeds.

This would continue until AD&D 2nd Edition when TSR would remove class titles from the game. In OD&D, Basic D&D and AD&D, it was assumed that at a certain level characters would have a greater scope and impact on the world. This is programed into the planning for the campaign world itself.

Character level corresponding to impact on the world continues even into 5th Edition D&D today, where there are no stated titles, but levels correspond to access and scope of power.

Note: There is an optional feature in the Dungeon Master’s Guide for “Renown” which establishes many of the same titles and ranks. Other titles became the names for additional classes.

How it plays out at the table

As Kelsey points out about Shadowdark, it carries the consequence of access. If you want to gain access to resources and power, you'll need to as they say in the Dungeon Crawl Classics community "quest for it!"

If you are a thief and you want to undo a cruel crime-boss in another city that left you for dead, gaining access to their streets will require manpower and greasing of palms. This isn’t something that one or two rolls of the dice will accomplish. The entire environment and social structure is working against you. You’ll need to gain the power of an “underboss” or renown “assassin” to pull this off. Otherwise corrupt officials will give you a deaf ear, or worse, turn you in to the competition! Local landlords won’t turn a blind eye to your rooftop shenanigans, and petty thieves acting as informants won’t allow the information to flow favorably.

Using level titles ties the characters actions to the world and it’s society, and best of all, encourages and rewards achievements in doing so:

As your thief grows in level and notoriety, you hear people speak of your exploits. When they do, they don’t just call you “Gavin the Thief” they say, “Gavin the Rook” and you don’t just hear about “Gavin the Rook” here and there. Wanted posters appear and songs are sung in taverns!

Inability to expand the scope of the campaign. (Could be a good thing)

There's also a connection with gaining estate and titles. Without recognition from broader society, people aren't likely to take your rabble seriously. What good does it do for a wizard to gain a tower only to have jealous wizards of greater renown and power seek to take it back from you? And did you get a deed from the Lord?

On the other hand, this use of titles could act as a check for the "scope creep" of a campaign. Do you wish to have "Fafhred and the Grey Mousser" who battle a dragon in one adventure only to return to their cups and gambling in the next and be peniless? Having a social order they don't fit into or are recognized by could be a way to accomplish this.

And what good would it do for you to slay a dragon if no one would believe you did it anyway?

You filthy peasant! How dare you brag above your station!

Quest for it!

Even if you do have a heirarchical world with guilds and orders and established titles, gaining a title might not be automatic. For titles that aren’t entirely reputation based like the example above, there might even be ceremonies or badges of office such as for a religious order or Knight.

Unless having the campaign in a tournament or story path style of game where much is assumed to happen between adventures, it can be a good part of the roleplaying to have characters travel to the authorities that bestow titles. This could also be the case for underworld organzations such as Thieves Guilds.

How cool is the title "Grandmother of Assassins"? Reminds of a certain group:

The idea that you ought to train to have new skills, search for new spells, take the time to learn them and obtain titles by writ and quest isn’t often clear in these old school RPGs, and is likely why it's confusing to people why titles should even matter.

For many people that run modern RPGs, titles are a part of the world, but they exist organically without a mechanical framework. Especially in modern RPGs where DM's expect the presentation of the world to center on the characters first, titles would seem like a distant concern, another paragraph written in the adventure for the location. For an old school campaign that favors the truth of the world above having a focus on characters, it makes sense for this to be a part of an established social order.

An example of gameplay

An excellent use of titles I've experienced recently is "Under Hill by Water"

In “Under Hill By Water” your entire gameplay experience is about currying favor and social position within a Hobbit society. You do this by throwing parties and putting on a good show at the Inn with song and dance. To gain a level is to gain a title other Hobbits refer to you by, and that is the only way a proper Hobbit might take on the challenge of throwing even bigger parties! Without the social recognition, you can’t progress.

Obtaining these titles based in a heirarchical world, with group identities could be really fun and interesting, spawning all manner of emergent stories and quests. But they aren't a required aspect of a fun fantasy RPG world.

It's certainly a matter of taste.

A Critique of Titles

Campaigns regularly have most or many aspects of the modern world, but with fantasy or medieval flavor. For this reason, your game doesn't suffer if you omit the use of titles.

Also, it is a strange thing to have titles rigidly tied to level advancement. What if the character advances in one way but doesn’t attain the social recognition of the title in the fiction? The same problem could be said of Wizards and their spells (which led to me flipping their advancement in some games from ‘you level to gain spells’ to ‘you learn spells to level.’ )

The greatest critique of titles I have is that they are an item most tied to the implied setting of a system. To have a selection of titles assumes a great deal about how that world must work, it is after all what the leaders of the world call themselves. Even within that world, what if the players travel to a neighboring culture, or even a demi-human culture such as orcs or sahuagin?

In these cases, using levelled titles seems to necessitate the construction of new titles, which Tim Kask has pointed out, is tremendous work with little pay off.

"Curmudgeon in the Cellar" 190 - Tim Kask

And this article in Grognardia shows, is likely on the mind of anyone organically creating their world with a selection of titles.

Summary:

1. If you have a medieval fantasy campaign mieliu, titles can be a useful and fun context for social order and another source of adventure and achievement.

2. Modern campaigns need not use them if the shoe doesn't fit.

What do you think of level titles?

Illustration from Basic Fantasy Roleplaying Game: https://www.basicfantasy.org/

In October of 2019 Keith Ammann published his popular book titled “The Monster’s Know What They are Doing - Combat Tactics for Dungeon Masters” based on years of blogging and advice. According to Keith, the premise of the blog was to look at monsters as “professional monsters.” They would likely act like professional Soldiers, carefully having prepared their moves and tactics in advance, rehearsed and executed them countless times. The Monsters would “know what to do” to emphasize their strengths and the character’s weaknesses when making contact in combat.

“The way to avoid this is to make as many of these decisions as possible before the session begins, just as a trained soldier—or accomplished athlete or musician—relies on reflexes developed from thousands of hours of training and practice, and just as an animal acts from evolved instinct. A lion doesn’t wait until the moment after it first spots a herd of tasty gazelles to consider how one goes about nabbing one, a soldier doesn’t whip out his field manual for the first time when he’s already under fire, and a DM shouldn’t be deciding how bullywugs move and fight when the PCs have just encountered 12 of them.”

-Keith Ammann - “About This Blog” Aug 2016 https://www.themonstersknow.com/about/

This blog and it’s subsequent book were seen as many in the 5e space as a kind of “revolution” to approaching monsters. Certainly, it’s much more interesting than what I call a “stabbing zoo” where monsters sit idly waiting for characters to come by and then rush to charge them with basic abilities and numbers like trash mobs in a multiplayer online video game.

It also helps answer one of the design flaws of Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition: the game is utterly unhelpful in providing the necessary “balance” for satsifying combat, which is the main focus of that game’s rules. At the same time, it’s also very difficult to continue to challenge players in Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition over time as they level and gain power.

From the perspective of the Old School Renaissance, one might also be sympathetic to the idea that monsters would be prepared to expertly apply their strengths on the player characters point of utmost weakness. Old School games are about player challenge and skill over gameplay abilities right? The OSR is lethal, right?

If you’ve seen my post on “The Myth of OSR Lethality” you probably already know my take on that. No, monsters awaiting player characters with a borderline meta-knowledge of them is not commensurate with the OSR style of play in my opinion, and in fact, is contrary to it. This is because it undermines the truth of the world, the potential for an emergent narrative instead of a pre-written plot and player agency.

My experience as a “professional monster”

As a former US Army Soldier, the idea that monsters might wait in ambush using just their best strengths and abilities against the player character’s weakest points runs contrary to my own experience.

I was taught both in Basic Training and Infantry School at Ft. Benning GA to not merely attack enemies when making contact with them. When gaining sight of the enemy, it was far more important to “define the battlefield” through information, so that the larger effort of US Forces could gain dominance through maneuver, terrain, firepower etc. When encountering the enemy unexpectedly, it’s not as though we know the full composition of their forces, acting on little information invites fatal disaster. Later in Intel Analyst school I was trained to piece together fragments of information to help “define the battlefield” for Commanders in order to help them in making decisions. Even then, it wasn’t always clear. We were often wrong, and didn’t know perfectly what we were doing.

Even using our greater strengths, we would have complications and issues that made the management of violence incredibly wild and unpredictable. Weapons would jam, sattelite technology would fail, and of course the ever present human error was there, “Murphy”. We might have superior firepower, and people would not clean their weapons. We might have superior mobility, and people would fail to PMCS (check the oil and tires etc.) their vehicles. We might have superior communications and command and control (C2) and idiot Commanders would squander it through poor judgment and even failure of character at the critical moment.

Often times we would succeed against an enemy not because of our own superior knowledge or abilities, on that account we would sometimes fumble, but mercifully, the enemy would fumble harder. They themselves would be uncertain of our capabilities. They would make wrong moves and decisions on poor assumptions. They themselves are beset by concerns about morale, disease, weather, and the secret weaknesses of their forces that they enter the dire gambit of battle knowing is a liability.

To return to the topic of Old School Renaissance games, there is no imperative (unlike in D&D 5e) to ensure encounters are both balanced and challenging. Having elements of the world tied to it’s own ecosystem and truths are challenging enough. Perhaps more importantly, this is more interesting and fun.

OSR games lend themselves to this sense of a living and breathing world that players can make choices in and succeed or fail without the interference of a Dungeon Master or even game rules trying to “balance” matters for or against them. Best of all, this means the players are really running the show by their own choices and agency (and it’s much easier to be an OSR referee when all you have to do is honestly present the world.)

Top to bottom design for emergent narratives

From the top-down, referees consider what Gary Gygax called the “campaign milieu”. The campaign milieu includes the “fictional soup” or “tea” that mixes together the fictional elements in a world that has an internal logic. While Gygax emphasizes that there should be set “truths” and hard elements laid down for the world to be logical, it’s most important for a referee to understand the fiction the rules are based on more than things like random monster tables and weather generation, which arise after the fact from the fiction.

“It is no exaggeration to state that the fantasy world builds itself, almost as if the milieu actually takes on a life and reality of its own. This is not to say that an occult power takes over. It is simply that the interaction of judge and players shapes the bare bones of the initial creation into something far larger. It becomes fleshed out, and adventuring breathes life into a make believe world.”

-”The Campaign” page 87 Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide 1979 Gary Gygax

“A Key Concept That You Need to Run OSR Games!” - Travis Miller Aug 2022

This “Open system” of mixed fictional expectations can be the primary tool for referees on what should appear on random monster tables and whether or not there should be a Thieves Guild in a particular city.

Gary Gygax suggests that the placement of threats, factions, monsters etc. should have a logic tied to this open system and the truth of it’s fiction.

“In general the monster population will be in its habitat for a logical reason. The environment suits the creatures, and the whole is in balance. Certain areas will be filled with nasty things due to the efforts of some character to protect his or her stronghold, due to the influence of some powerful evil or good force, and so on. Except in the latter case, when adventurers (your player characters, their henchmen characters, and hirelings) move into an area and begin to slaughter the creatures therein, it will become devoid of monsters.”

-”The Campaign” page 91 Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide 1979 Gary Gygax

Gary Gygax goes on to suggest how monsters might migrate, be depopulated, repopulate, how adventurers may either migrate or set up roots and become the local establishment.

Whatever happens, this underlying agreed upon fiction, the open system the “campaign milieu”, the truth of the world, is the authority upon which monsters appear, which monsters and where, as well as how they will act when encountering player characters. The actions of monsters are divorced from player characters and their abilities, and the immersion breaking and contrived storytelling of a Dungeon Master placing monsters facing the player characters to “challenge them”.

Bottom to top design for emergent narratives

From the “bottom up” the Monsters also don’t know what they are doing. And I believe this is one of the keys to allowing a narrative to emerge rather than being written in.

One of the failures of modern RPG adventure design is that they tell you what to do and where to go or try to anticipate player actions. They have a lot of implied assumptions, especially trying to “guess” what players might do, and then it’s left for Dungeon Masters to try and bring these narrative elements into harmony. New Dungeon Masters look at adventure paths and modules and think this is easier to lean on, that they lack skill and that is why the difficulty is so high.

An excerpt from “Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel” - Wizards of the Coast, 2022. One of the most poorly rated D&D adventures of our time, after nearly a decade of poor adventure design tradition by the mainstream. It uses the same “adventure path” formula for Dungeon Masters, providing a single hook, expecting player characters to take the hook, then head to he next location and story beat. It uses language very often like, “If the Characters…” to anticipate their moves.

The truth is actually the opposite. Already arriving at what is going on in the adventure and then trying to find ways to weave them together with both player character backstories, a truth to the world and then the wildcard of player choices is a steep hill to climb indeed (not to mention those pesky dice rolls). It starts at the end and then tries to reconstruct the whole body of work to the beginning. The truth is the beginning is the hard part, and the human mind is an amazing machine for filling in the gaps. What we need are the various elements of the world, and then creative reason naturally arises from these elements to do the work for us. We need the “who, what, when, and where” and our minds will naturally tell us the “why” and “how.”

In Matt Finch’s recently re-released masterpiece “Tome of Adventure Design” he uses evocative phrases and words in the margins of the text and then presents paradigms and patterns to allow people to quickly produce adventures rather than giving them an adventure and having the world-builder work back to a truth.

“…a human trait known as apophenia — our ability to look at a set of unrelated things and find a pattern in them. The obvious example is the way people perceive shapes and pictures in a mass of clouds…It’s not exactly the same as creativity — creativity involves generating novel and quality ideas, whereas apophenia creates patterns that might be creative…”

Foreward to the Revised Edition - Tome of Adventure Design Revsied, Matt Finch 2022

This is the key in old school gaming to presenting a realistic world with very little effort on the part of the referee. It’s fun and easy. Our brains are made to do this.

In Old School Essentials (same as Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set, 1981) procedures help to provide the “ecosystem” locally for what is going on with monsters. It does so in a single page allowing Referees to determine the who, what, when, and where within moments. It remains only for the referee to determine the “how” and “why.” This is suprisingly easy to do when you already understand your “campaign milieu” and then are given everything except the “how” and “why.”

The “Encounter Sequence” page 124, Old School Essentials - Classic Fantasy Rules Tome, Necrotic Gnome 2020.

See the “Encounter Sequence” for a Dungeon above? Taken by itself it gives you no information for your game, it doesn’t interact with the “campaign milieu”, “open system” or “fictional soup” of the world to become a narrative yet. But let’s go ahead and run this together adding together a “how” and a “why” at the end of each:

Encountering what? The Referee has determined that in the Temple of the Frog God there are Lizardmen guarding an ancient unholy shrine using Page 140 of the Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy Tome, any other tool or simply their imagination.

They create a table of 6 monster encounters including 2D4 Lizardmen appearing. During the dungeon procedure after 20 minutes or two turns, the Referee rolls a “1” on a D6 indicating a random monsters appear relative to the fiction and the dungeon’s ecosystem.

1. Surprise - Are either side surprised? Each side rolls a D6 and the Lizardmen roll a “1” indicating they are surprised.

   WHY - The Referee determines that the Lizardmen are occupied with some unholy ritual, making inhuman croaking noises to supplicate to their amphibion deity. This noise they are making and focus has made them unaware of someone approaching.

2. Encounter Distance - Where are they and how far? The Referee rolls 2D6 and rolls a “12” indicating they are 120 feet away. Since the room around them is only 30 feet long, and the players weren’t “surprised” the Lizardmen are in another chamber.

   HOW: Using the fiction of the world the Referee determines that since they are occupied with an unholy ritual and can be heard 120 feet away, the sounds of their croaking must be echoing down a nearby hall from the refuse pit where the Grey Ooze is down an ancient well. The Grey Ooze in the ancient well is an element of the fiction designed in advance when the referee created the dungeon. The Lizardmen are part of the ecosystem of the dungeon, but weren’t orginally planned for this room. This creates a new fictional tension, as the Grey Ooze may or may not become involved later.

3. Initiative - Because the Lizardmen are surprised, the players are able to act after the Referee describes the situation.

4. Actions - If the Lizardmen become aware of the players, or if they hadn’t been surprised, the referee might roll 2D6 for a reaction roll. Either way you might choose to determine their disposition.

   WHY - On a result of an “11” the referee determines that because of the fiction surrounding the game so far, knowing that a group of human cultists work for the Froghemoth and the player characters had to slide through a muddy sludge to arrive at the site, it makes sense that the Lizardmen simply regard the player characters as lowly human cultists. Humans are merely food/pets after all, and they look the same smooth, lumpy, nondescript way for the most part to the Lizardmen.

   Notice: The reaction of the Lizardmen is facing the world and their place in it, not the player characters and their abilities or the expectation of a tactical combat.

As part of Step 4, none of these truths of the world are given as exposition but the Referee now has everything they need to provide an interesting situation.

A group of Froghemoth obedient Lizardmen cultists sulk in the dark around an unholy altar, unaware of the player characters nearby. If they see them, they’ll likely regard them as fellow cultists (or food) unless they are hostile.

With this information arising naturally from the combination of the world and player choices so far rather than being pre-written by an adventure designer, the Referee can describe their situation:

“After sliding down the thick, sticky mud you are in the dark for a moment as you clamber to re-light a torch. For a moment it seems as if it won’t light but thankfully a weak flame sputters at the end of the rugged handle. The cavern chamber here is about 30 feet long and 20 feet wide, in the flickering torchligh your companions are covered in muck head to toe. Somewhere in the distance down a cavern tunnel you can hear echoing the sound of guttural croaking noises, combined into some kind of unholy chant.”

Now, “What do you do?”

What will the player characters decide? Do they get caught? If so, what will they do when it’s clear they are being invited into the ritual? What about the Grey Ooze at the bottom of the shaft? For the Referee, this doesn’t matter. They are an impartial arbiter, combining the truth of their campaign milieu with the dungeon procedure and then presenting this to the players to make their own choice.

The story is whatever arises out of this situation and the choices the players make. And the referee has had to prepare very little at all for all of this to come together. They story will be the player’s story, not the Referee’s pre-written one, and it will be much more interesting and memorable.

In Summary:

• The Monsters do not, in fact, know what they are doing

• This is because they aren’t simply existing in the world for the sake of the player characters but act according to their own logic and concerns in the world. They are very often unlikely even aware of the existence of the player characters at all. Even if they are it is very unlikely that they have a clear view of what the player characters intentions and capabilities are.

• Designing a world with central truths, applying procedures that create a framework of choices and then reacting to the choices of players is actually an easier and harmonious way of running RPGs unlike modern style adventures where DM’s are told to maintain story beats, already have a direction for the story then attempt to weave together the disparate elements of player character backstories, the dice and player choices.

• Apophenia is a powerful tool of our mind. Being given the beginning; the who, what, when, and where, is all we need to piece together the how and why.

• The story that arises from the table is more interesting than one written in advance

A few weeks ago we played through several sessions of the classic Basic D&D module "B4 - The Lost City" by TSR from 1982.

This module exemplifies everything that old school D&D has to offer. Being only a few pages in length, and a step pyramid with mostly rectangular rooms, it appears deceptively simple at first glance, and that is exactly what this module teaches about Old School D&D.

Like modern OSR adventures, a referee can read through B4 just once and then put it on the table for play with almost no prep at all. It's organization is as good as could be expected from 1982, and such simple organization for official modules has since been lost during the Hickman revolution until only these recent years of the OSR (and then only slightly improved by modern OSR designers).

Room descriptions are simple, providing only what is needed at a glance. There are very few paragraphs and blocks of text. When blocks of text do show up, they are necessary to explain something more complex immidiately in the dungeon, not drifting into a soliloquy of lore not immidiately important to the room at hand. The layout allows the referee to use just the map and the room descriptions to run, and this minimalism also makes the page count small. It is actually for the referee and useful at the table.

The elements of the dungeon combine into a soup of adventure that allows an emergent narrative to arise. This can all happen with very little work on the part of the referee. The intro text for the referee and flavor text is fairly short. Instead the mystery of the Lost City arises through gameplay and clues in the world the players can pull on and investigate, piecing together the mystery naturally. By using the Basic and Expert dungeon crawling procedures of the same era, factions and monsters will naturally interact and cause the space to evolve rather than being xp and gold pinatas put in the way of players, or just scary threats lurking in the dark (and they are scary).

The use of space in the dungeon makes the step pyramid feel vast by the 3rd level of it, even though the full diamater of the dungeon is perhaps only a few hundred feet. Because of the factions and levels, as well as the mystery beneath it all, B4 can actually become an entire setting allowing for dozens of gameplay sessions with almost no prep. We found we needed to come to a natural stopping point because we hadn’t anticipated needing multiple sessions to complete what seemed like a short module! You could easily make this a single one shot as a foray into a strange archeological site, or it can become an entire campaign. Best of all, whatever story and experiences arises from that unexpected setting will be entirely driven by player choice.

The Bad:

1. Some key information in different parts of the module - Using the pdf helped with this, but there are several pieces of key information that required me to flip back and forth through the module. For some reason, several of the explanations for key encounters was placed at the end of the module instead at the beginning with all the other tools. This resulted in needing to have 3 different places in the module held and flipped back and forth at the table, and it was easy to lose my place. For example, the wacky descriptions of the mutated Cynideceans were in the back of the module. The rooms where they could be encountered are in the body of the module, and the encounter tables where they are rolled for are in the front!

In another place the 3 gods are described in the body of the module, but I had to return to the front of the module to find it's details in the intro text.

The module would have benefitted from having all of the tools to run it in one place and the room descriptions in another.

2. The POD scan isn't perfect - At one point I actually caused the entire party to become lost as the referee and had to simply provide them the way out because between sessions they had winded their way around so much, that when they came back to certain parts of the dungeon from the opposite direction, I couldn't recall what they experienced.

This would be fine because I kept notes, but the scan from Wizards of the Coast (for me at least) made it very difficult to see the symbols defining changes in levels, stairs vs. ladders etc!

If possible, I recommend not getting a POD from Wizards and instead getting a good used copy from eBay or Noble Knight Games (I generally recommend this anyway).

The Good:

1. Dark Sword & Sorcery of a forgotten time - In every way drawing from the Dark Sword & Sorcery of an Clark Ashton Smith story, the step pyramid is just weird. Modern modules simply don't contain this amount of grit, attitude and depth. Everything from the descriptions of the inhabitants and their society (some of the weirdest in any module I've seen), to the horrific truth at the bottom of it all, the environs of the desert and step pyramid evoke a sense of a lost city that should perhaps have stayed lost. The whole thing is dripping with flavor, and would probably not be as well recieved by the broader “kitchen sink” high fantasy/power fantasy audience of modern days.

2. It pulls no punches on dungeon crawling - Going in, water resources are incredibly important, and several levels in the scarcity of food and water may cause the players to make...questionable...choices regarding how to stay alive. Light is life. There are no "stores" or merchants here, although there are factions that can be used as sanctuaries. Because of the use of claustrophobic spaces, weird factions, roaming monsters, moving corridors and scarcity of resources the Lost City becomes a "mythical underworld" of paranoia and survival.

3. The Cynidiceans - Without spoiling it, and related to "Good" point #1, the Cynidiceans are so weird and interesting they jump off the page with only a couple lines of description. These factions and the random table of weird encounters for them at the back of the module are worth the price of admission alone.

4. The perfect starting place for old school play - Many recommend "Tomb of the Serpent Kings" as the ideal "teaching" dungeon to begin old school play. I like that module (and it's free!) but I contest that I doubt the "teaching dungeon" formula has ever been improved since 1982. By simply reading the module and then applying the dungeon procedures from B/X to the game, players and referees will naturally learn the importance of clever thinking, planning and resource management without any need to brief them of their importance in advance or explain in blocks of text within the module. The interesting skills needed for old school play naturally arise from this brillaint adventure by Tom Moldvay.

Recommendations:

1. Run this as a pure, theatre-of-the-mind dungeon crawl - The players should have grid paper for this one! Describe the length of rooms and hallways in a creepy, uncertain and haunting way, but help them map with the raw details of dimensions and lengths. This is the perfect module to actually put the dungeoneering rules of Basic and Expert D&D to the test.

2. Use an old school game system for this - Don't use Dungeon Crawl Classics, Pathfinder or D&D 3 through 5e etc. that encourages fighting monsters at level 1. This is a module that makes older systems shine, and depends on resource tracking and light for the tension, as well as evading and being circumspect about social encounters and monsters. Use "Old School Essentials", "Swords & Wizardry", "Knave" or even just one of the old games right out of the box and start the players at level 1.

3. Allow the story to emerge - This is the perfect module to show how an ecosystem in a dungeon environment using the lost dungeon crawling rules of D&D allows a story to emerge with a combination of the strange elements of fiction and player choices alone. It's an excellent module for the referee to kick back and observe the glory of emergent storytelling they had no hand in "writing."

We had an amazing time playing this module, and it took very, very little preparation on my part to run. Overall, I’d give this module an “A-”

We are incredibly excited about a new direction for our Central Kentucky Folk RPG play club as well as our international online Discord play club for the coming years!

From now on, we’ve simplified our rules around our two core principles for community and gameplay:

Be Kind. Don’t be political.

Additionally, from now on we will focus exclusively on what we call “Folk RPGs.” Our community worked together over a few days to start to define this emergent gameplay style and community which we feel encompasses much of the hobby, excluding only the mainstream, consumerist part of the tabletop community, and this is what we came up with:

Definition of Folk RPG:

1. The table is the authority, the table is ours.
2. Community drama and issues outside of tabletop do not govern or drive the actions of the table. The table is the authority.
3. Not loyal to a brand, corporate or group mindset.
4. Whatever happens at the table is real. Whatever happens on the internet, may not be. When playing on the internet, we treat it like an analog, in person table.
5. The fictional world, quality of play and camaraderie are more important than the rules, mechanics or products.
6. Community is important, as defined by the table and those at it. Pass on what you have learned, in person, to people outside the hobby. Honor the lineage and traditions of the tabletop hobby and it's luminaries, but be not bound by them. Drive it forward, make it your own.
7. If there is an RPG rulebook, break all the rules. Mutate and contort them into a joyous chaos experienced by the table. The table, and those at it, are the authority.

Folk RPGs are something you do like knitting, fishing or meditating. It raises the spirit, it unites instead of divides. It can be understood, spoken and participated in by all people.

Consumerist, brand, corporate RPGs are something you buy and subscribe to such as box sets on Wal-mart store shelves, merchandise, TV shows, official modules and adventure paths, and organized play. The brand/consumerist mindset sees D&D as something like the Marvel cinematic universe or Pokemon, that can be bought, participated in, traded, adhered to and discussed and dependent on a corporation controlling an intellectual property.

This distinction is most evident in Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition, combined with the "brand name" consumerist, corporate hobby where you can "buy D&D at Wal-mart" wear t-shirts, watch shows and collect plushies. While many of us do buy D&D products, it does not control what we do at tabletop roleplaying game tables with others. D&D for us is not a product. It is a folk tradition that can't be controlled by any one person, corporation, faction, trend or political movement.

You can play the mainstream, corporate game and do so in a folk way. The mainstream, consumerist, brand hobby is valid for those that enjoy or borrow from it. But we have found it necessary to establish a space for the rest of us. For the weirdos, the pariahs, the punks, the madmen. We built the hobby and it has become something else. Now we pass on the beautiful chaos of storytelling and togetherness, departing from brand control.

We are excited to continue this adventure with everyone and look forward to our many adventures together in 2023 and beyond. If you are looking for a table to play at and are in the Central Kentucky area, look us up on Facebook and MeWe: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2153575574938009

If you are not in the Central Kentucky area and are looking for a group, come chat with us on Discord where we run almost a dozen games a week on our server!

https://discord.gg/zbr37hQU

Be Kind. Don’t be political. We love you all!