A tale of two Sandboxes

My unexpected descent into the Classical gaming playstyle from Modern Adventure Gaming (aka the modern OSR)

The purpose of this blog post is to report how I shifted from playing and running modern adventure games like Knave, Shadowdark and light B/X retroclones to favoring OD&D and AD&D clones and originals. It's also an initial opening of the door to reveal the differences in playstyle between the Classical playstyle and the modern OSR.

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.)

Page 92 Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide - 1979 TSR

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.

Page B3 - “Dungeons and Dragons” (Basic Set) 1981 TSR

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.

My gigantic, keyed, mostly not at all used hex map for “Evening Lands” OSE campaign

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.

Thanks Bill Webb (Rappan Athuk 2012 - Swords & Wizardry - Frog God Games)

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.

Page 103 - Vehicles and Animals - OSE Advanced Players Tome - Necrotic Gnome

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!)

Page 80 - Wilderness Adventures - Swords & Wizardry Revised Complete - Mythmere

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.

“The Danger of a Mutable” system - 1st Edition AD&D DMG Preface 1979 TSR

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.

An unexpected ordering of play - Afterword - 1st Edition AD&D DMG 1979 TSR

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