1. One article or blog entry that exemplifies the best of the Old School Renaissance for me:
The Other Moathouse
2. My favorite piece of OSR wisdom/advice/snark:
Mornard's Three Laws of RPG Rules
3. Best OSR module/supplement:
Classic Dungeon Designer's Netbook #4: Old-School Encounters Reference
4. My favorite house rule (by someone else):
Jeff Rients' table for what happens to PCs who don't make it out of the dungeon before the end of the session
5. How I found out about the OSR:
We were talking on the forums at dragonsfoot.org sometime c. 2003ish about how it seemed like there was increasing interest in older approaches to D&D exemplified by stuff like Necromancer Games "3E rules, 1E feel" slogan and Hackmaster and the Dungeon Crawl Classics modules aping old TSR trade dress and Troll Lord Games' plans to create an OGL 1E-like system that Gary Gygax could use as the basis for his "Castle Zagyg" reskinning of the original Greyhawk Castle Dungeons, and so on, and someone said "it's almost like there's an Old-School Renaissance on the horizon" and the phrase struck a chord and we started using it after that, as a joke at first but a few years later people (mostly "come-lately" types like James Maliszewski) started using it more seriously.
6. My favorite OSR online resource/toy:
Dungeon Robber
7. Best place to talk to other OSR gamers:
Around a table, playing a game
8. Other places I might be found hanging out talking games:
Dragonsfoot, Doomsday Message Boards, the 1e AD&D Round Table group on Facebook
9. My awesome, pithy OSR take nobody appreciates enough:
That D&D is better and more fun when you include the material Gary Gygax added to AD&D in the early 80s that was originally published in Dragon magazine and later collected in the Monster Manual II, Unearthed Arcana, and the World of Greyhawk boxed set, and when you continue to expand beyond it in the same aesthetic spirit. You can still have fun with D&D without needing to (a) remain permanently frozen in amber in 1979, (b) embrace all the lazy and tonally-dissonant garbage TSR and Wizards of the Coast churned out after 1985, or (c) reimagine D&D into something so "gonzo" that it's no longer recognizable to what we fell in love with as kids.
10. My favorite non-OSR RPG:
King Arthur Pendragon, by Greg Stafford (R.I.P.)
11. Why I like OSR stuff:
Because, before the OSR, D&D (versions 3.5 & 4.0) had gotten to be almost totally about math and bean-counting and "character builds" and had lost sight of the freewheeling spirit of actual play, and the OSR reminded folks (including/especially younger folks who missed the "old-school" era the first time around) that it wasn't always and didn't need to be that way.
12. Two other cool OSR things you should know about that I haven’t named yet:
i) Midkemia Press is selling (and in some cases even giving away) their old books in pdf format. Their book Cities is still one of the best, most useful rpg products ever published IMO.
ii) You can purchase legal Print-On-Demand hardcopies of a lot of the 1st Edition AD&D rulebooks and modules (and pdfs of most of the rest) at RPGNow. Tip to the wise: don't bother with anything published after 1985 ;)
13. If I could read but one other RPG blog but my own it would be:
Mortal Worm - Just Keep On Rollin' with Gene Weigel
14. A game thing I made that I like quite a lot is:
AD&D Companion (my "fan-fic" compilation of uncollected AD&D material by Gary Gygax combined with my own house rules and additions that try to maintain the same spirit and show that old-school-style AD&D can still be a vital, growing thing)
15. I'm currently running/playing:
Nothin.' But I've got a growing hankering to run another game someday, if I can find the time and energy. We'll see...
16. I don't care whether you use ascending or descending AC because:
The rules don't matter. They never mattered. If you think they matter, you've missed the point.
17. The OSRest picture I could post on short notice:
Good stuff, Trent! :D
ReplyDeleteAllan.
From Zak S to T. Foster! Now that's a wide spectrum if there ever was one. :D If we'd all sit down and sing Kumbayah, the world would be...
ReplyDelete...nah. War would be preferable! .)
Zak and I are parallel in a lot of ways - we have the same last name (and neither of us uses it), we live in the same city (and even in the same neighborhood for many until we both left it (in opposite directions - he to downtown, me to the suburbs) a couple years ago), and of course we've got shared obsessively esoteric interests in Thomas Pynchon and D&D. We're like characters in a 19th century novel or an Alan Ayckbourn play who started in the same place but have made opposite choices at every crucial juncture :)
DeleteI glossed over that first one! Hopefully I can get PART 2 of that swinging. The map is done but text needs to be ironed out. I'm stuck on the first part of the planar. I was finalizing the art a certain way and it was a forced march that wasn't working so this will be the first set with B&W sketches and a color diagram. I was originally setting them in a for instance of how these monsters work. I popped it open the next day and thought someone is going to make this permanent in their mind then its going to stick forever like how kobolds are now dragons so I needed to back up.
ReplyDelete