The Village of Gallowsthorn

Using Inkarnate to do simple ISO maps of the villages and settlements on my regional map. This is the village of Gallowsthorn. Back during the bad old days of the Kingdom of Asmogar there was a prison here where they used to inter and execute those who fought against the Wraith King. The prison is just a ruins now although one of the wizened old hanging trees can still be seen out front.

There is a comfortable Inn in the small village, The Rosethorn Inn, which was built before the Kingdom of Asmorgar and has been the only tavern and Inn within the village for nearly three hundred years.

An overgrown old segment of road, now a barely visible trail leads off to the Southwest where another tumbled ruins from the Kingdom of Asmorgar sits.

Hate for the OSR?

Over the last year or so I've been somewhat perplexed by the hate being sent online in the direction of OSR writers and game designers.

It seems to me that a few isolated instances of bad behavior by a few bad actors has been used to try to throw shade over the entire thousand or so people who have been involved in OSR fandom and creativity from the beginning.

I don't believe for a moment that the motivation at the core of the anti-OSR movement is based in some altruistic attempt to create a safe haven from the mean, bad wrong, exclusionism of old white men and their dungeons and dragons hobby.  The anti-OSR movement is about identity politics.  Namely it is about labeling people as insiders versus outsiders, good people versus bad people, with the goal in mind of ripping the hobby out of the hands of the people who were there all the way back at the beginning so that some younger, more "enlightened" group, namely the handful of actors at the center of the anti-OSR movement can become the money makers and gatekeepers of that segment of the hobby.

When you step back and watch the anti-OSR crowd play out in their own forums they are more about social dynamics and who is "in" and who is "out" in certain social circles than in anything regarding the creation of cool RPG games or campaigns based on the original rules of dungeons and dragons.  In fact very little of anything that is being produced, if anything at all, has to do with the rules from basic dungeons and dragons or 1st edition D&D - which was what the OSR movement was about in the first place.

I think that one of the things that sticks in the craw of the anti-OSR leadership is the fact that most of them cannot share a direct personal experience where they were growing up in 1976 to 1982 when RPG's were in their infancy because they weren't even born at the time.  As someone who was there and lived through the infancy of roleplaying games and early RPG clubs, I can say from direct personal experience, that we were one of the most inclusive and safest havens for people from different racial, cultural and sexual backgrounds of any social group in high school or college at that time.

Our circle of gamer friends included men, women, people who were black, hispanic and asian and several friends who were out of the closet gay or lesbian (to those of us in the game club, where they could be themselves) who were still in the closet elsewhere in their lives because of the general intolerance of the times.

The D&D kids were very welcoming.  We were the punk rock kids.  We were the metal kids. We were the goth kids.  We were the art and theatre and the band kids.  We were the math and computer nerds.  We were, together, all of us, the social outsiders of our age and we stuck together and forged bonds of friendship which have lasted for more than thirty years.

I would ask anyone in the leadership of the anti-OSR movement making spurious claims about how it was all a bunch of mean old white guys from the beginning one question.  Were you even alive and old enough to be playing in an active dungeons and dragons group or club back in 1980?  If not, what are you basing your comments upon other than a bunch of made up garbage about events happening in a time and a place when you weren't even born?

It is with some relief that I can say that I've seen the following of the anti-OSR movement slowly dwindle over the last few months.  Part of this comes from them eating themselves alive in hateful back and forths about who is more self righteous and woke.

The OSR was always about a fandom for the original, simple roleplaying games from the period of the late 1970's through the 1980's.  It was always about writing alternate rules, new dungeons and adventures and material for those out of print rules sets.  Period.

The OSR was never about excluding anybody from any walk of life from contributions of their own ideas and materials.

With this one caveat.  As with any writing or creative endeavor, it IS possible that any writer or artist may find their work not well received because it is poorly written or poorly executed or just poorly received by the audience.  While the OSR is very inclusive, if your bag is writing Furry sex roleplaying material, your work is going to probably only be of interest to a very small subset of the OSR community.  Why?  Maybe because its just not fitting into the core hobby interest of that group - which is 1970's and 80's vintage roleplaying games and not Furry fandom or sex roleplaying games.  Now there is a pretty huge furry fandom culture out there where that particular kind of RPG might find a wider audience.  Which is cool and awesome and have at it.  But don't walk into the Star Trek fan club with your game about Star Wars and get all offended when none of the hard core Star Trek kids have any interest in your Star Wars stuff.  In the same way if you want to hang out with the OSR kids then at least bring games and adventures written for those 1970's to 1980's era games with you to the club meeting.  Otherwise your exclusion has zero, zippo to do with your race or sexuality and everything to do with you bringing completely off topic material into a hobby group.  Like...bringing your passionate love of RC airplanes to the model train club.  Take your RC airplane stuff to the RC airplane club where it can be appropriately appreciated.  You won't get very far waving your RC airplane in the air screaming against social exclusionism and unfairness at the model train club...the people there who would otherwise be happy to have you join them to talk about - model trains- (go figure) will just look at you like you are completely bonkers.

So.  The OSR crowd will keep writing adventures and dungeons and zines for the hobby that they love no matter what crazy arm waving and hate spewing the anti-OSR crowd is throwing their way.  Because after all...we put up with a lot of bullshit from the jocks and the popular kids going all the way back to high school when we were the punk rockers, metal heads and goth kids in our D&D groups back in the day and we survived all that rash of BS and hate without any problem, thanks very much.

Maybe when this particular subset of the woke crowd figures out that we were woke twenty years before they were even born, they will come play D&D with us and stop throwing hate.  Like I said.  The D&D kids were always one of the most accepting groups at school, even thirty to forty years ago when it all started and there will always be an open chair for the new kid who wants to play at the table...so long as they aren't taking a huge verbal dump on one of the other players at the table.

The Town of Bolgrad

Bolgrad is the only significant town on my current adventure map.  There are several other smaller villages, much smaller really compared to Bolgrad and I plan to do these Inkarnate maps for each of them.

Bolgrad is situated on a tall plateau left behind by the activity of glaciers in the region hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Within the walls of the town there is a substantial hill.  The hill is the highest point on the plateau and it has steep grass covered slopes leading up to a stone statue of the Northern god Balder, the god of warriors and heroes.

Within the hill and below the town in the limestone rock of the plateau, there is a substantial network of natural caverns.  The caves closest to the surface and entered through a large cave mouth on the South side of the hill, have been used as burials for the people of the town since it was established, two hundred years ago.

Bolgrad is the major trade center for the surrounding lands.  The next closest substantial town of this size is the Warhold of King Gudbrand, roughly forty miles to the Southwest.

DCC RPG - After Report

So.  I managed to get to play DCC RPG as a player tonight.

It was ok.

The DM was super nice and did a great job.  The players were super nice.

What got in the way, for me, of the game being fun was the game system.

Simple rules does not always equal fun in a game system.  Yes I know.  I am a super big advocate of early RPG games but when you create an introductory game experience for new players where the zero level characters are so ineffectual and paper thin that a single average roll...not even a bad roll...but an average roll means instant death, it just leaves me bored and unimpressed.

I felt absolutely zero investment or interest in whether any of my characters lived or died, were successful or failed and as a whole I think that most of the players were feeling the same way about their characters as well.

The comedy of your character gets shredded into a thousand bloody pieces is funny, sure, the first time or two but two hours into the "funnel" it was just boring.  No.  Boring is not the right word.

Stupid.  It was stupid.

All together I think we played about a four hour session.

At the end we got to roll to see how our "stars aligned" to get us ready to convert the characters from zero level throw aways into first level throw aways, or at least that was the impression I got.

Get this. If you rolled lower than a six on 1d20 your character, that you just did your level best to keep alive through this funnel despite only having three hit points and no actual skills or abilities to draw upon to make any of it even vaguely interesting...if you rolled less than a six, your character was zapped back in time as if nothing ever happened and you had to turn them over to the DM.

Yes, that is correct.

You spend four hours of your life playing the game trying to be clever and keep a couple of your paper thin goons alive and at the end of the game, one low dice roll and randomly nothing that you did, no creativity, nothing, allows you to keep that character. 

So.  I am going to keep playing DCC RPG in the hopes that somewhere down the road the game gets better.  I own the books.  I've read through good chunks of them and I am hopeful but reading through something and actually playing it are two very different things.

For now I am giving DCC RPG - the introductory play experience in the funnel with zero level characters a one half star out of five. 

Descriptive words for the published adventure for the funnel I would use are boring and overly simplistic.  Descriptive words for the introductory experience playing through the zero level part of the game would be...boring, uninteresting and a waste of four hours of my life that I will never recover.

If you haven't purchased DCC RPG - I would hold off until you play it a few times to make sure the game is worth the money you are going to drop on the books.  The books are cool looking and like I said, the rules once you get playing seem interesting so I am holding out hope that this will improve.

Hopefully when I post again about DCC RPG I will be able to rave about how awesome the game is after you create a level one character.