One thing I’m keenly aware of these days is that my personal journey with running and playing D&D is in large part a microcosm of the larger OSR movement that unfolded while I was away from the hobby.

I played D&D back in the 80s, drifted away, came back with third edition, fell away, tried to get my kids into the hobby with Pathfinder, bounced off that (although it really hooked one of ‘em) got invited to play fifth edition, bounced HARD off that, and then rediscovered the old ways and the old school. That is to say, I did what everyone else did, only 15 years later and at my own pace (including, apparently, starting a blog).

And I’m only just now starting to really understand why people start hacking systems and how powerful that really is. Before, I was always kind of the opinion that the world doesn’t really need another version of D&D, but now I get it. No one version is perfect, and maybe these are less rules and more toolkits anyway. There’s nobody who’s going to care whether I’ve mixed and matched rulesets – I’m not going to get kicked out of D&D!

In fact, while writing this , I just so happened to stumble across this post on Travis Miller’s Grumpy Wizard, which basically says this perspective has existed from jump and ends with this simple, brilliant advice:

Do not seek to play The game. Play Your game.

Thus, here I am trying to decide if I should use BX or Swords & Wizardry or OSE for my next campaign, and clearly, the real answer is to start with whatever, begin adding to and subtracting from it, throw in some of my own sauce, and come away with “my” D&D, which is what people in the hobby have been doing from the very beginning, including Gygax and Arneson themselves.

In fact, this even solves the secondary problem of having too many systems to play because I can just play them all at the same time by using the pieces and parts that make sense for me and my table. Very demure, very Jeet Kune Do.

To that end, I’m building a “Players Handbook” in Quest Portal for easy access during the game (though I think I’m going to shift that documentation to a neutral location), and it’s going to be a living document. I think it’s important to have a canonical home for it, so everyone who plays in my games is using the same rules, but there’s no reason why we can’t collaboratively decide we like the initiative system from this one but we like the resource management from that one. And when someone publishes a new spin on the game, we can borrow from that as well.

Anyway, I’m about to burn a Christmas gift certificate on The Elusive Shift so I’m sure I’m going to get a lot worse about these theoretical meanderings before I get better.

Discuss...

#osr #dnd #ttrpg

After wrapping up a 3 ½ -year campaign, I’ve started planning the next one and hope to cross another thing off my TTRPG bucket list: a mega-dungeon. And it just so happens I grabbed The Halls of Arden Vul when it came up in a Humble Bundle, so we are good to go, right? Let’s roll ‘em up and get delving.

One small hiccup: what system do I use? WHAT SYSTEM DO I USE?

I mean, the plan was to just use good old B/X. We used that earlier this year for our playthrough of Keep on the Borderlands in honor of D&D’s 50th anniversary, and we all had a blast. The simplicity, the flexibility, the ease of character creation after the first party inevitably got bodied…plus, I still own the original books!

But then…I also have the Basic Fantasy 4th edition rulebook. People rave about that and I am super into the whole open-source mentality.

But then people also rave about Old School Essentials, and that’s on my Christmas list.

Plus I have Hyperborea 3e and have been dying to try that. Hell, I’ve still got my original AD&D Players Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide, so why not just keep it legitimately old school? Arden Vul was made for OSRIC, after all. Hell, maybe I should look at OSRIC?

And I just downloaded Swords & Wizardry because the PDF was 5 bucks and I have a job.

Plus, let’s be honest, I’m going to tinker a little here, graft on a mechanic there, steal a bit and make some shit up at the table and whatever system I choose isn’t even going to look like itself after four sessions.

I’m agonizing over this decision, and it’s stupid, because they are all the same god damn game anyway.

I mean, obviously they’re all iterations of the same rules, which were themselves iterations of each other due to contract weirdness and interpersonal beef between Gygax and Arneson. At the end of the day, it’s six attributes, hit points, roll the dice, steal the treasure, and hail Satan. And in the age of the virtual table top, a machine’s going to handle the rough stuff anyway, right?

Somewhere I read a piece about TTRPG essentialism, the gist of which is that every TTRPG is actually the same ur-game anyway. Basic or Advanced or 5e or Traveller or literally whatever, it’s all just a re-statement of some Platonic role playing game that exists independently of our attempts to codify it.

That may be true, I don’t know. But for some reason, Swords & Wizardry gets me excited to play when I read the rules in a way that Basic Fantasy doesn’t. I don’t know if there’s some grand philosophical reason or if it’s just because the font choice and artwork resonate better.

I think maybe that’s really the dragon I’m chasing: that excitement. The same excitement I experienced the first time I cracked open that Player’s Handbook and this whole D&D thing opened up in my mind like a fever dream. Some systems hit and some don’t, and I’m sure what lights me up leaves someone else flat.

All that to say, right now, I think we’re using Swords & Wizardry, with Goblin Punch’s Underclock bolted on, played on Quest Portal, starting in about a month, at which time, I’m sure all of the above will have changed.

#osr #dnd #ardenvul #ttrpg #swordsandwizardry

Earlier this year, our group successfully concluded our campaign The Tales of the Green Dragon Brotherhood, and now that I’ve had some time to think about it, I wanted to write up a quick retrospective, capturing what went well, what didn’t, and what this campaign meant for me personally going forward in the hobby.

If you’d like to read about the campaign in gory detail, it lives on LegendKeeper here.

Honestly, the primary thing I wanted to accomplish with this campaign was, well, actually running a campaign. As I’ve written before, I have played a lot of games in a lot of systems, but had never been able to run or play in a campaign all the way from beginning to end. So the fact that the same group (mostly) started and ended together after several years and dozens of sessions in the same game world felt like a massive success. The fact that it ended with the exact die roll a specific character needed at exactly the right time was just icing on the cake.

Another sort of meta-level success is that by starting the campaign, I also started our game group (affectionately known as The Sunday Night Dirtbags, and there will be more to come on that). I initially sent out an email to a few guys I’d played with over the years, then we pulled in a couple of work friends, then a couple internet friends, and lo and behold, we now have a regular crew that vibes pretty well. We like the same kind of games, we take the same approach, and we’re all moderately able to keep to a schedule while still giving each other the grace that being adults with jobs and lives requires.

The system I chose – Low Fantasy Gaming – worked perfectly for the kind of campaign this ended up being: very sandboxy, very emergent. The mechanics really clicked for us – martial exploits, luck and rerolls came in clutch over and over, but so did the looming specter of PC death. We lost two PCs in the first two sessions, which set just the right tone. We used the Midlands campaign map right out of the box, and I only added a couple of towns out of necessity. I started the whole thing off with one of the written adventures (Tomb of Graxus), and the set pieces from that ended up influencing the entire campaign- I couldn’t have written a better, more narratively satisfying conclusion.

And I mean that – I couldn’t have written it. Every preconceived thing I did in advance for this campaign ended up being pretty useless. I started out very nervous about wanting to do this thing “right,” so I read a bunch of books and blog posts about how to GM properly, going so far as to write up the stuff recommended by Sly Flourish’s Lazy DM system – which I then promptly ignored and/or couldn’t shoehorn into the actual game at the actual table at all. Almost everything of note happened due to a random roll on an encounter table, an unexpected player choice , or me taking something they did and running with it.

There was an entire little mini-arc on a strange, alien planet complete with ray guns, bandersnatch, tribes of frog men in a hollowed out asteroid, and psychedelic mushrooms – none of which was remotely contemplated when I decided to run this game. Which is to say, this campaign really helped me learn how I actually GM. Turns out, I’m not a “write a 5 act story” kind of guy. Which is good, because I gravitate pretty heavily to the OSR so emergent play is the order of the day. All that to say – I now have some confidence as a GM I didn’t have when the campaign started. I now know what “my way” is, and I feel good about it.

One thing I’d like to improve on with the next campaign (and “improve” is not really the right word) is to really enforce things like resource management, wandering monsters, morale, henchmen/retainers, encumbrance – those old school techniques that I believe can really serve to force meaningful player choices. I tried to introduce a couple into this campaign, but it was too little, too late. We were already having very loosey goosey fun so it didn’t feel totally correct to suddenly start enforcing stuff like encumbrance rules at the end.

Of course, doing that will require some solid campaign management tools, and that’s another area I feel like there’s room to explore. I ran the campaign mostly in Foundry, using LegendKeeper for campaign notes and the occasional homebrewed monster or weapon. More and more I find myself resisting the urge to use most VTT tools. I don’t want automated everything. I don’t want animated maps. I don’t want my tabletop game to become a slow, crummy video game. Earlier this year, we spent a few sessions playing Keep on the Borderlands using the original Basic D&D rules, and everyone just used fillable PDFs and a shared dice roller on Quest Portal, and I think that’s the direction I’m going. Although that site has a ton of functionality – mostly I just want a nice splash screen, some ambient music, and dice, with the ability to pull up a grid if we need it. But I’m going hard towards theatre of the mind for the next campaign, make no mistake.

All in all, I could not be happier with how things turned out. A great group helped make a great game. Onward!

#sessionreport #osr #dnd #ttrpg #lowfantasygaming

So even before I started reading Cory Doctorow’s Chokepoint Capitalism, I had begun to realize just how much control I’d given over to The Algorithm on various platforms. Amazon was recommending me books; Spotify had quite ably steered me onto their playlists; Instagram had me trapped in an endless scroll of jiu jitsu moves and boobs.

Deleting Instagram was really the last step in a long chain of removing myself from social media. Twitter and Facebook had just been making me mad all the time, so ditching them was essential, but it also made me super aware of how completely they’d inserted themselves into my life and the lives of everyone around me. I still show up at cancelled classes at my gym because all communication goes through Facebook.

I inconveniently decided to break away from Amazon about a week after I spent some mad money on a Kindle Scribe (which, full disclosure, works great as a digital notebook, Amazon’s issues aside). Still, I started buying my books at Kobo, and then realized I could buy a lot of them directly from the publisher, and in the case of Doctorow, from the author himself. Ironically, it was the sunsetting of my Barnes & Noble Nook that made me realize how many books I’d just lost access to and also that Amazon could do the same thing to me at any time.

(I figured out a way to get access to all those Nook books and download them as unencrypted epub files, which I then stashed away. I have a similar workflow I use on all purchased books. I want a secure copy that will persist regardless of platform-level decisions).

I also bought a different ereader – a Boox – which gives me access to all the books I’ve bought, regardless of platform, since I can either download epubs directly or use a number of different proprietary apps if I need to.

My understanding is that Boox may have its own issues with privacy, but if the Chinese government wants to know that I’m reading yet another epic fantasy novel instead of something from my used book pile, I say let them. Which, yeah, I could just buy physical books and avoid the whole mess entirely, but we’re a house full of nerds and we’ve run out of bookshelf space.

Books more or less sorted, I’ve turned to music. I was already annoyed with Spotify – the auto-generated playlists had a weird circular logic going on (they’d put a song on every playlist, and then say hey, you obviously love this song because it’s on every playlist, so here’s another playlist with that song), and I also became aware of how long it had been since I’d listened to a whole album. I know that makes me sound old, but to be fair, I am. But also, there are some albums I love, and not listening to them after years of doing so was evidence that I’d gotten in pretty deep with The Algorithm.

Doctorow’s book opened my eyes even further with the detrimental effect Spotify has had on the entire ecosystem of music – artists especially (who have already spent decades getting hosed by by the industry even before streaming services came along). So now I’m trying to figure out where I’m going to get my music (Bandcamp when possible; for other stuff, I’m going to try to find a less-horrible-than-Spotify streaming service). We do now have a used record shop in our town (dammit – they don’t have a website, just a Facebook page; THIS IS WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT HERE), so I’ve started buying actual records again as well. Plus, I found an old hard drive with a bunch of MP3s on it, so those are now backed up and copied to my phone.

Is it even possible to ethically consume media in the digital age? I don’t know, but I feel like it is possible to consume it in ways that are less bad. These are baby steps, and mostly shouting into the wind, but they feel good to me.

And also, I’m only halfway through the book, so there are likely a lot more good ideas to come.

#capitalism #algorithm

It’s surely not the most important thing right now, but the election of Donald Fucking Trump is really complicating the mid-life crisis I was having anyway.

My career – really, my second career – is at a turning point, my age is starting to assert itself, my kids are growing and having grown-up problems I can’t help them solve, and we had to go and put god damn democracy on notice?

The problem with this blog – as with every little proto-blog I’ve left scattered across the internet – is that I have every impulse to write, but I’m not sure I have anything to say.

Still – we stand at an inflection point, and a lot of us are rediscovering The Old Ways of the Web: blogs, RSS, non-algorithmic social media, newsletters and actual moments of human interaction. Maybe that will get us through.

So perhaps I’ll sprinkle in my thoughts about such things, along with fitness, jiu jitsu, tabletop roleplaying games, technology in general and working in technology more specifically. I don’t expect I’ll have any great ideas, but maybe I can be a moment of humanity in someone else’s day.

Note: this is a repost from an older blogging platform. Links may be hinky.

The Owlbear Boys Ride Again!

This was one hell of a night of fantasy adventure gaming: amazing feats were performed, characters died for reasons poetic, combat was cleverly avoided (until it wasn’t), and the tech stack stayed the hell out of my way.

We started the session back at the Keep, of course. A week has passed so the PCs had to do some financials for room and board, which left them pretty cash strapped and also really clarified the old school play loop: of course they’re going back to the Caves of Chaos – they’re fuckin’ broke. They chose to not hire any help but two players did run two characters each, including a new Fighter. Great news, right? Another sword never hurt!

They hoofed it back to the Caves under a grey cloudy sky and while deciding whether or not to re-engage with the Kobolds, Earl the Thief caught a glimpse of a Goblin lookout taking notice of them, which the party interpreted as evidence of an impending attack1. Rather than leap from the frying pan into the fire, they went with Door Number Three and fled towards an as-yet unexplored cave (the surely-not-that-bad Shunned Cavern).

Staying true to the “as written” nature of this…I guess it’s a campaign now?…as the players searched the bones and gristle at the cave entrance, I rolled for wandering monsters and wouldn’t you know it? A grey ooze falls from the ceiling. Now, these players have had some bad experiences with grey oozes, though obviously, the PCs have not. They role-played the situation beautifully, though, with the dewey-eyed Cleric urging peaceful co-existence and the Dwarfs just wailing on the thing. Alas, one of the Dwarfs got hit by a gooey blow, which dissolved her armor and revealed the fact that she goes commando, which condition persisted the remainder of the night. The new Fighter turned tail and ran out of the cave, claiming to be looking for “rocks to throw or something.”

Eventually, the ooze was dispatched and the party moved quite cautiously deeper into the caverns. They’ve adapted to old school play, so it was slow going and ten-foot-pole prodding. They came upon a nest of giant rats, though I finally remembered to perform a reaction roll and the rats weren’t too fussed. They moved quietly enough to begin to hear the sounds of something big snoring in the distance. Rizz McSwag, the other thief, decided to investigate, and dear reader, hand to God, this motherfucker had the hottest dice you’ve ever seen.

First level thief needs to move silently? Dude rolled a 9 on d100. Check. He comes upon a slumbering fuckin’ owlbear and decides to backstab it. Double damage die nearly maxes out, taking 2/3 of the thing’s HP. Rizz wins initiative, hits again, and another near max damage roll and just like that, he’s killed an owlbear by himself and trust me, that didn’t do anything for his humility.

The party resumed their exploration (after dubbing themselves The Owlbear Boys), and upon discovering the shallow pool and yet more oozes, they quite cleverly attempted to lure an ooze away with a trail of “owlbear chunks,” because boy did they want the bejeweled chalice at the bottom of the pond. While the lure was successful, they didn’t count on yet a third ooze, and rather than risk a fate worse than a topless Dwarf, they decided to ditch this cave and try another.

Climbing up the hill a bit, they discover a cave entrance festooned with signs promising “Safety, security and repose for all humanoids who enter – WELCOME! (Come in and report to the first guard on the left for a hot meal and bed assignment.)”

Again, props to the player whose Cleric bought it hook, line and sinker3. They went in, found the guards, who offered the good Reverend Cherrycoke a skewer of meat and then ran him through with the same. The battle was joined and well, the party’s luck ran out. When the dust settled, the Cleric, the new Fighter (who didn’t fight shit), and the gruff-but-sweet married Dwarf/Elf couple lay dead and the two ranged-weapon-preferring thieves and the free-swinging Dwarf were hightailing it back to the Keep.

Looks like The Owlbear Boys are hiring…

Miscellaneous Notes

• A combination of Quest Portal as VTT and LegendKeeper as map/manager worked perfectly.

• Really enjoying this foray into B/X and the roots of the hobby. This group has three other campaigns going, including my own Low Fantasy Gaming campaign which is about six sessions away from completion, so we’re moving on in the rotation. I am very strongly thinking about shifting this game to another night and running it as an open table for now.

• Descending AC really isn’t that hard to work with, you cowards.

#dnd #osr #ttrpg #sessionreport

Note: this is a re-post from an older blogging platform. Links may be hinky

It was a rather unique session last night, in that all of the characters survived, but it wasn’t until this morning we got confirmation that all the players did.

One of the group is on vacation but did not let that prevent him from showing up to the game absolutely shattered on cheap Portuguese wine. He put in a good effort, but faded fast. The last ten minutes he was with us was just his chair on video chat. Then his laptop battery died and poof, he was gone.

Thematically, I feel like this was right on point for Keep on the Borderlands.

The game itself was super fun. The PCs hocked the necklace they got last week and used the proceeds to hire a few retainers^1^, having clocked the deadly nature of the Borderlands (and on a meta level, old school play). One of the players decided to run two characters as well. Again, perfectly in line with the module’s advice!

I also decided to fast track their discovery of the Caves of Chaos because this group has done plenty of wandering in the woods in other games and I’m not sure how long I can hold their interest in my old school reset^2^. 

Upon finding the Caves, I read the block text right out of the module (again, the challenge is playing it as written, full stop) and they got to hack and slashin’. They found the goblin cave first, and while it looked like the goblins might parley, steel was drawn and pretty soon the caves were littered with little green bodies. The ogre was, of course, summoned, but the retainers^3^ made quick work of it, and the party emerged from combat mostly unscathed.

Upon discovering that the cave also houses women and children, they had a bit of a moment of conscience and quite cleverly waited for the remaining goblin fighters to run for the battle before tiptoeing their way back to the cave entrance and exiting.

There was still daylight left, so they trudged over to the kobold cave where a PC and a retainer promptly fell into the pit trap (both survived, but barely) and a kobold war party attacked. A couple PCs took some damage but eventually the party came out on top, freed the trapped folks, and started actually sneaking deeper into the cave. One of the thieves nailed their Move Silently roll and they did enough recon to realize that discretion is the better part of valor and heading back to the Keep to rest and recover was the smart play.

In terms of finding fame and fortune in the wilds…I think they cleared about 2gp apiece, though they did get a modest pile of XP for their troubles. 

All in all, a very solid night of old school gaming. Some housekeeping notes as the DM:

• Quest Portal continues to shine as a perfect VTT choice for this game. The scenes and music set a good tone, and there’s just enough token functionality to keep numbers straight without it devolving into a bad video game.

• Planning the session, I wanted to be more diligent in my application of reaction and morale rolls. I did okay in this regard, though the players did remind me a couple of times – mostly out of survival instincts. I also need clarity on when to roll morale: at the moment it’s appropriate or at the end of the combat round. Advice welcome in the comments!

• This is definitely an old school D&D game in that it got a little samey-samey with the combat. I feel like this is about 60% just the way the module is written, but 40% me not doing enough to spice things up. The bad guys could use a few more tactics, yeah? That’s on me.

• Next week I need to lean into the faction play a bit – see if I can get the PCs wrapped up in some intra-cave dweller drama.

• I gotta buy Keep in PDF format. I need to make notes about what’s been cleaned out, but I am loathe to mark up my vintage original module!

At the end of the day, I’m still super glad we decided to play Keep. I think it’s going to pay off for our group^4^ in the long run when we get to the “real” open table sandbox game I’m planning.

—

^1^ One of the PCs did more than just hire their retainer…a little dwarf love in the hinterlands never hurt anyone, right?

^2^ One big reason I wanted to play Keep with the Basic rules as written is because I want to go back to the beginning of the game and really understand the fundamentals. I feel like it’s practicing drum rudiments or drilling armbars in jiu jitsu. You have to grok the basics if you want to be able to perform the fancy stuff.

^3^ In retrospect, I may have overcorrected a little from last week’s TPK and made these henchmen a little too badass.

^4^ While introducing ourselves to our drunken player’s wife on video chat, we dubbed ourselves the “Sunday Night Dirtbags,” and for sure that’s going to stick. 75% chance there’s going to be a podcast with that name launching in the near future.

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Session Report: Keep on the Borderlands #1

Note: this is a re-post from an older blogging platform. Links may be hinky. Originally posted on 1/29/24

We celebrated the 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons in the most appropriate way: with a total party kill in the very first encounter.

Let’s rewind, just a touch. We knew the anniversary was approaching, and I’ve been wanting to play some different systems. I also just so happened to find my original copy of Keep on the Borderlands, along with my original copy of Tom Moldvay’s Basic D&D rules (plus some other assorted gaming goodies that will no doubt be featured here at some point). So I pitched it: how about playing Keep using the Basic book as written? My group, of course, was all in.

They rolled up their characters during the week – we ended up with three dwarfs, an elf, and a cleric (the player made him a cleric of Graxus, a god that features quite prominently in our long-term Low Fantasy Gaming campaign). No backstories, minimal equipment, and barely any hit points. Yup, we were going old school for sure.

Keeping our “as written” edict in mind, I read the introductory paragraph right out of the module, and we were off. The players introduced themselves to the men-at-arms guarding the Keep (a great little conceit) got the tour from the corporal of the guard, and then found themselves standing in the courtyard staring at each other. They’re experienced roleplayers, so very quickly we had established one of the dwarfs cheated on the other dwarf with the other dwarf’s sister, the elf was here on something like rumspringa, and the priest was here to spread the word of the Iron God. They hit the tavern, one of them sang for his supper, the ale flowed, and the next morning, they tromped down the road and into the Borderlands.

Long story short – they followed the river into the fens, encountered the lizard men, steel was drawn, and, combat was joined. Side initiative, phases of combat, morale – we went By the Book. And as it turns out, first level characters are not what you would call hardy. More blows were missed than landed – by a wide margin – and pretty soon, we had five dead PCs (and one dead lizard man, credit where due) and at least another scheduled hour of game time to fill.

Luckily, it’s easy to roll up characters, which we did. Just like that, we had a party of ne’er do wells ready to step in. Again, my group saved the fun by deciding that this party, led by the aggrieved dwarf sister above, had been shadowing the first party with an eye towards ambush. The dwarf wanted revenge, the cleric wanted to kill the Graxian heretic, and the thieves wanted, well, money. They lurked in the bushes and let the lizard men do their dirty work. Then they looted the bodies, finished off the lizard men, and returned to the Keep with a necklace to sell, a story to tell, and honestly, a shockingly meager helping of XP.

Holy shit, was it fun! 

Going back to brass tacks was refreshing, and it’s fascinating to see the echoes of these rules in the games we’re playing today. There are grey oozes in the Caves of Chaos, and a big ol’ grey ooze got our current LFG campaign started. Maybe it all really is the same game after all. 

On a nuts and bolts level, the players are going to have to adjust their mindset, but so am I as the DM. I need to remember things like morale and reaction rolls, which could have helped them avoid that fateful encounter – they’re not kids. They can use their words and I probably should have let them take more of a stab at that.

Finally – a note on the technology. I wanted to stay aligned (see what I did there?) with our “as written” philosophy, so I tried to keep it as theater of the mind as I could, though we are a remote group so some concessions do have to be made. We had fillable PDF character sheets and I used Quest Portal as our VTT, which was perfect. We had shared dice rolls, music and background pictures for flavor, and only used grids and tokens to keep track of numbers and zones.

All in all, it was a super fun – and honestly meaningful – celebration of this game. The group is into the idea of continuing Keep, which is great, because I am, too. Shit, I gotta see if they can make it to second level.