Zak Smith of HitItWithMyAxe posted this list of 20 questions he wanted us to answer. I hate chain mail, but I'm happy doing this one, because the OSR is RAD.
1. One article or blog entry that exemplifies the best of the Old School Renaissance for me:
I love this piece by Joseph Manola about the OSR and its obsession with ruination and decay. when i read it, it just made sense immediately and ending up inspiring large pieces of my work.
2. My favourite piece of OSR wisdom/advice/snark:
“Rules are hard to remember and details are easy to forget under stress. Intent is not. Intent is easy to recall and unlike detail it actually grows more powerful under stress. You remember who hates you. The more stressed you are, the more you remember it.”
This quote from Veins of the Earth by Patrick Stuart sums up my opinion of rules vs rulings, and also process vs procedure. It actually sits on my desk, glued to my office computer at my actual job.
3. Best OSR module/supplement:
I think Veins of the Earth is simply unsurpassed from every design perspective, but it probably suffers from being too arty.
The most useful thing I’ve ever ran is Skerples’ Tomb of the Serpent Kings. This stellar low level dungeon should be the “I don’t know what dungeon to run tonight, lets play *blank*" for every single OSR DM.
4. My favourite house rule (by someone else):
I love the Black Hack’s usage die for food, light sources etc. I don’t know if that’s technically a house rule, because its part of a game already, but so many people use it as a house rule in other games that I reckon it counts.
5. How I found out about the OSR:
I was looking into Swords and Wizardry, after reading the Sword of Air, a mega campaign by Frog God Games. I remember then researching stuff like Dungeon Crawl Classics and them stumbling across Questing Beast’s youtube channel. From there, I bought a copy of Fire on the Velvet Horizon and the rest was history.
6. My favourite OSR online resource/toy:
You can find every map you ever needed for a fantasy game here, in the storage repository of Dyson Logos:
7. Best place to talk to other OSR gamers:
I love Discord Servers. My favourite is the Questing Beast Patreon Discord server, but if you can’t get onto that, Twitter is pretty sweet.
8. Other places I might be found hanging out talking games:
A few other discord servers for Troika, DIY RPG or OSR. If you want links to any of these, message me or comment below.
9. My awesome, pithy OSR take nobody appreciates enough:
I love being rid of death saves, instant death or whatever, and replacing it with a coin toss. Tails, you live are unconscious. Heads, you die. It makes some really fucking dramatic moments.
10. My favourite non-OSR RPG:
I know we aren’t meant to like story games, but I really love Blades in the Dark. It is a game carved like a bullet to do exactly one style of campaign and knock it out of the park.
11. Why I like OSR stuff:
Less commercial and corporate. People make OSR shit because they love it and its cool. Most of it isn’t designed to shift copies or meet some targets, its because someone has a genuine passion for a project and made it themselves in the desk on their kitchen. The art is just better. There is less direction and it isn’t stale. Its like comparing original John Blanche stuff to something from a modern 40k product.
12. Two other cool OSR things you should know about that I haven’t named yet:
Luka Rejec, the WizardThieffighter and Stratometaship guy, has made two awesome products lately: Ultraviolet Grasslands and Witchburner, as well as doing art/layout for lots of other projects. This guy is the full package and does all of the art/layout/writing for his books. UVG is sublime and reckon everyone should read it. Grab his Patreon here and his twitter @Stratometaship
Other shout out is Troika by Dan S and the Melsonian Arts Council. The game is weird and utterly British and janky and I absolutely love it. Grab the Patreon and the book on DriveThruRPG
13. If I could read but one other RPG blog but my own it would be:
Coins and Scrolls, cos Skerples makes a crazy cool blog full of massively gameable shit. Additional shoutout to any of his stuff on Feudalism, which a lot of people may find dry but i think is amazing.
14. A game thing I made that I like quite a lot is:
Best Left Buried. The fantasy horror RPG game I’m written and is currently available on DriveThruRPG. It's been realeased but I weirdly haven't made a blogpost yet, mainly cos no one reads this blog.
15. I'm currently running/playing:
A Black Company-esque mercenary game using Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying 2nd Ed, but set in my own version of medieval Europe. The players are chasing a bounty on a knight who is impersonating another knight. They decided the best way to draw this guy out was to write him a letter while pretending to be his long lost brother. Many letters have been written at the table and exchanged. We have spent 2, 4 hour long sessions without a single combat.
16. I don't care whether you use ascending or descending AC because:
I know this cheating but I do care. Sorry?
Descending AC doesn’t make sense to me. I have distaste for role under systems in general, because I think you should always have consistency of dice expectation. If high is good on damage rolls (and it always is) then 'to hit' roles or skill checks should be good as high too. It creates a massive disconnect with new players for the system. I hate when players have to go "Wait should this dice role be low or high for it to be good?", or ever worse, confusion after a dice lands about what the good results are.
Games that don't obey this rule, like Black Hack, GLOG, Into the Odd etc, will just never be things I want to run.
I make an exception for WHRP 2nd Ed, because D100 low is the only place where low is good and I feel like that is a different "dice space" that is defined separately from the rest of the game where high is good.
17. The OSRest picture I could post on short notice:
I call this thing “Footshark” and it comes from Best Left Buried. It’s mad.
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