If I were ever to return to play, I would aspire to have disposable characters die glorious deaths and weave an epic tragic tale instead.
My brother was much better than me. He was a Dungeon Master. Now he writes fantasy novels.
Osr authors have produced many wonderful books. Definitely worth checking out. So games like OSE are carbon copies of older games. Other like knave try to modernise and streamline things while keeping the spirit.
There seem to be two categories of OSR games, as far as I can tell.
One is a category of games that are more or less faithful reproductions of some pre-3.0 edition of D&D rules, without any setting information. This is possible apparently because of an (untested?) understanding that rules cannot be copyrighted.
Most of those games are free downloads. Just the ones I have on my drive:
OSRIC (Old School Reference and Index Compilation)
Dark Dungeon (2nd ed. D&D?)
Labyrinth Lord (1st ed)
Old School Essentials
Swords and Wizzardry
Neon Lords of the Toxic Wasteland (1st ed. BX)
Lamentations of the Flame Princess
Lightmaster
Dungeon Crawl Classics
As far as I've read up, DCC and Lightmaster seem to be the ones that depart the farthest from the original rulesets.
The other category is a category of rules-light, low-effort games that are often no more than a commentary on D&D and TT-RPGs in general, sometimes in zine format.
I don't want to give too many examples of those because my description probably sounds disparaging enough, but see this link for some such games (or "games"):
https://liberludorum.com/2021/03/29/sword-satire/
And I'm probably missing a few categories of OSR games. For instance, The Black Hack, Rogue, Troika and Into the Electric Bastionland seem to be OSR, but I haven't had the chance to read them and figure out what they're about. Anycase, the OSR movement seems to have started around the time of this essay:
"A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming"
https://archive.org/details/a-quick-primer-for-old-school-ga...
If anyone understands what OSR is, or means, better than I do, please help because I'm just confused. I don't even know what the comonly accepted definition of the "OSR" acronym is supposed to be (or if one exists even).
A lot of the Troika book is character profiles/archetypes/etc. if you tell someone this is a wild game, make up your craziest character, they will probably not be as “out there” as the provided archetypes. You roll 2d6, and get a refined alien cannibal (well, not exactly a cannibal, I guess, someone who wants to eat other characters) or a character that has become “enlightened” (chemically, surgically? I can’t remember) to the point they have very little thought. So anyway, between wacky characters and wacky skills, that’s what in the troika book. Some simple rules, No setting aside from a one session adventure, but flavorful skills and character ideas.
What I don't understand is what common elements Troika and Electric Bastionland, for example, share with Dungeon Crawl Classics or Old School Essentials. They seem to me like completely different kinds of game, in tone, mood, rules, and everything else besides.
Not that this is a bad thing, I just get confused about what's OSR and a bit frustrated that it seems a bit cliquey in the end. Like you gotta be an insider to get it and if you don't get it then you don't need it explained.
> In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work
The core rules have no copyright protection and it's "untested?" because the language of the law and the interpretation of it is pretty clear and consistent.
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/intellectual_property_law...
These are not really all satires, although I like that post about satirical games a lot.
The Quick Primer is about as good a general definition of OSR as you're going to get.
https://www.amazon.com/Adventures-Damnation-Kane-I/dp/138779...
> Damnation Kane: Irish pirate captain, born in 1650 to an English Puritan and an Irish druidess. Through means mystical and mysterious, somehow Damnation finds himself, with his ship The Grace of Ireland and his crew of scalawags, in strange seas. His ship damaged by battle and by storm's fury, Captain Kane and his men seek a safe harbor; in the process they make dangerous new enemies, and tensions among the crew worsen. Because they do not know where they are, nor how they came to be there. Is it Hell? An undiscovered country? The land of the Fae? No: it is Florida. In the year 2011.
The novel isn't D&D swords and sorcery, but my second favorite scene is fantasy-like, where Kane's druidess mother casts an elaborate spell in a desperate attempt to contact him across the sea and centuries. (My favorite scene is where the pirates invade a Home Depot, and the guy with no thumbs swinging chains attacks a table saw...)
D&D definitely played a role in developing his narrative talents. Amazing game.
Dunno why it's not on Amazon, but it's available as an eBook on SmashWords in several different formats including mobi (Kindle).
https://www.smashwords.com/books/byseries/33132
The first 8 chapters can be read for free on the SmashWords web reader:
https://www.smashwords.com/extreader/read/823124/1/the-adven...
> Time shenanigans is one of the bingo square prompts this year on /r/fantasy
Oho?
The full title is "The Adventures of Damnation Kane Book I: Out of Place and Out of Time".
Here's a teaser (the story is mostly told from the perspective of Kane as a ship's log):
> But that thing that I saw when we came in sight of the shore! I thought it was a part of the land: the White Cliffs of Dover on the shore of the New World. Until it moved. Until it blew smoke from its back, like the spume of a whale, and sounded a horn that could have drowned out Gabriel’s trumpet, and then it sailed across the bay before us. Against the wind. Against the tide.
> It was a hundred feet high, two hundred. Pure white, shining like the clouds in a summer sky. It would have stretched from one end of the village where my mother raised me to the other, and beyond. It was smoking – there was fire on it – fire, the curse of ships, the terror of all sailors. And it sailed through the waves, without sail, without oars.
> I looked through my glass and I saw the faces of the men and women aboard. I saw children. They smiled.
> I looked at its bow and I saw written there in letters as tall as a man, “GRAND PRINCESS.”
> It was a ship. A ship the size of a mountain.
> We are in Hell.
Here's the /r/fantasy bingo: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/ttrev1/official_rf...
At the moment of watching the show I didn't realized but, after learning the fact, it was obvious that I had been watching a role campaign.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Vox_Machina
I’d loosely describe it as Final Space set in Middle Earth. Though I found the humour far less forced than in Final Space.