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Friday 22 May 2015

On the Third Generation of OSR Products

There's been some talk on the OSR blogosphere lately about the question of just what is really valuable in the OSR, setting or rules, and about what the OSR is producing or may produce (or should be producing) in the future.   That is to say, where shall the innovation be?

Tenkar (of Tenkar's Tavern) came out saying that he thinks the future of the game should be more products like Spears of the Dawn or Arrows of Indra, complete games where the innovation is the setting and "less reworks of greyhawk or the forgotten realms".   While Rob Conley (who I'll note provided the excellent maps for Arrows of Indra) admitted that these are not really his cup of tea, and that his " preference is for bog standard fantasy world but with depth" (giving Harnworld or Ars Magica as examples).

The Greyhawk Grognard has pointed out that he thinks there were two phases in the OSR, the first being retro-clones and the second going off in "new directions". 

All of them made mention of this question of "where is the OSR's Tekumel?", and the impetus for this seems to have been the new White Star game.

I'd argue that in fact there are now three phases in the OSR.

The first was the retro-clones.  This was to me by far the least interesting part of the OSR, though some argued a necessary part, and they are pretty much finished now (since we've cloned just about everything that could be cloned and a few things that maybe shouldn't have been, to the point that we're left picking through Dave Arneson's discarded grocery bills in search of mythical clues to some kind of lost UR-D&D).

The second phase is still going on, which is the largely rules-fronted OSR games: those games that are not retroclones but whose innovation and creativity is largely focused on rule-modifications of the standard D&D concept.  These are games like ACKS, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, or Fantastic Heroes & Witchery.
These could still go strong for a good long while, because there's way more room for creative maneuvering than with the retro-clones or even the almost-clones like Adventures Dark and Deep, as good as that is.

But now what we're just starting to see is Phase III:  which is the products that are all about focusing on an old-school setting that obliges a new way of playing D&D; these will have rules that are different from the standard but what makes them shine is not the rules-difference but the setting-difference.  I'm proud to say that Arrows of Indra is one of them (as is the aforementioned Spears of the Dawn), but I also think these are in some ways just the baby-steps (or easy pickings) of what will eventually become a huge new source of creative wealth for the OSR.

These types of OSR-games are exactly the kind I'm interested in making.  Aside from AoI, within a month or two we'll see the release of Dark Albion: The Rose war.  What will make it interesting and different from the two examples above is that AoI and Spears both got their inspiration from looking at D&D from the point of view of a cultural difference in setting; whereas Dark Albion is going to be, to slightly alter Conley's demands, "European Fantasy with depth".  It will be D&D done for deep-historical gritty European fantasy, which will be closer in some ways to stuff like Ars Magica, Harn, or Pendragon than anything we've seen for the OSR thus far. Indeed, while it will be instantly familiar (and particularly appealing, I think, to any Game of Thrones fan) its 280-or-so pages of historical-fantasy detail will unlike any D&D setting I've ever seen.

The days where people could get away with the "10' x 10' room with 2 giant rats and exactly 2000cp" rut that the JMal-branch of the OSR nearly got stuck in is over.  What's coming up now will defy anyone to think that there's a lack of creativity in the OSR, as if the second-phase products hadn't made that claim provably absurd already.

RPGPundit

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13 comments:

  1. I don't disagree with what you're saying, but I think the question of whether there are two or three phases is largely a semantic one. I think the important division is between flat-out restatements (or near-restatements) of the older rules, and more innovative material. And that's what we're seeing in full-force today.

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    1. Yeah, but I do think that there's a useful distinction to be made between innovative rules-based books (with or without a setting) and innovative setting-based books. Noting where the key part of the innovation is found can be helpful.

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    2. Perhaps so, but "phase" implies some sort of distinct time-frame (phase 3 follows phase 2, which followed phase 1). That's how I used it in my original post; phase I (restatements of old rules) was over, and now we're in phase II (innovations in setting and emphasis) is now here. Your "phase 2" and "phase 3" are happening in parallel, so "phase" doesn't really seem like the right term. Not sure what might fit better...

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    3. I think it is a set of stages, though, because the rules-innovation stuff started to happen first, and went on for quite some time before the earliest of the setting-innovation stuff (like Arrows of Indra) started to come around.

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    4. Joseph has it right, experimentation with setting boundaries can be traced back to Carcosa and surely even further. Rules- and setting-innovation is mostly happening in parallel, but settings are still a rich pond to fish in compared to rules.

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  2. I think there is a sense in which the clones were important as a distinct phase; back in the late nineties/2000, TSR/WotC employee Ryan Dancey was claiming, repeatedly and forcefully, that any supplementary material written for any form of D&D was automatically owned by them, that that was what copyright law meant. That not only were rules restricted under United States copyright law, but compatible works were, too, and not only that, but if you wrote a compatible work to a rules set it was automatically owned by the rules set copyright holder.

    When I wrote Gods & Monsters back in 2000 it was initially in response to that: after going in circles with him on adventures, I decided to push the battle line back to rule sets rather than adventures and other supplementary material. But I enjoyed it too much and decided to take it seriously.

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  3. I like to think that the OSR is D&D rebooted. There is the TSR branch, the WOTC branch and hopefully the OSR branch. We've made our retroclones and now it is time to take the training wheels off and see how far this can go. My opinion is that it doesn't matter where it goes, just so long as it doesn't stagnate. That's where I think the OSR has it miles better than TSR or WOTC ever could. Too many talented people out here creating.

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    1. Its the irony that because it's "amateur", the OSR has a much larger pool of incredibly talented people than WoTC can possibly have. Not to mention that some of us are too controversial to ever get to be regular staff, even if they did hire us as Consultants. But again, even as regular staff it wouldn't be the same because we'd be constrained by having to follow the "canon" of what they want D&D to be.

      Since there's no such restraint with the OSR, the stuff that will come out for it (aside from a few stinkers) is bound to be more creative than what Wizards is putting out, however good some of the official stuff might be.

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  4. To me the most exciting/interesting thing about the OSR is the equivalents of the Arduins, the T&Ts, and the Runequests. The people who look at clones and TSR era D&D and think okay this stuff is back on the table for fucking wiith; what can I do with it?

    LotFP, DCC , Red and Pleasant Land, ASE, Yoon Suin are all the type of stuff I'd like to see more of and have covered the Arduin side of stuff (as in oh these are D&D rules but tailored to an idiosyncratic campaign), but I'd like to see a few more T&T & Runequest reactions to the OSR (as in okay D&D is cool but what if we did things like this . . .). The only one of these I can think of is Heroes & Other Worlds which is a very good mix of TFT and B/X.

    Of course, there's a certain amount of irony involved in this blogpost as Pundit's FtA! is a creative mix of D&D and T&T that (I think) predates the OSR and is largely ignored by the OSR, and JMal whose Dwimmermount is used in this blog as a lame example of OSR product wrote some killer blog posts about how the OSR is like an alternate history of how D&D could explore lots of different paths.

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    1. It sounds like what you're mainly into is what I'd call Phase II.

      I don't know if FtA! makes this "ironic". I'm in no way shitting on Phase II of the OSR. And you're right: "Forward... to Adventure!" was actually a Phase II OSR product back when the OSR was only just starting their "phase I" (that I was not a part of). So it was too far ahead of its time to be accepted by the Clonemaniacs.

      By the time the OSR's Phase II had gone into full steam, I was already kind of past that, because I'd already done it with FtA, and after that had been busy with Lords of Olympus (a non-OSR product, obviously). So when I got back to focusing on writing something old-school, the result was Arrows of Indra, which was among the early Phase III products.

      Dark Albion is going to be a full-blown Phase-III-in-its-prime product.


      As for JMal, he was an opportunistic bandwagon-jumper who talked a big talk but then absconded with the funds when it came time to shit or get off the pot. He may have inspired a few people to dream of what the OSR might be, but he was also directly responsible for the ultra-conservatism of Phase I (some good Swine-style elitism he no doubt picked up from his White-Wolf-fanboy days), and for the Talmudic obsession with poring over texts and speculating over pre-TSR dribblings in search of the the "True Ur-D&D".

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    2. Maliszewski did turn me on to a couple of sci fi writers, though, so there's that.

      Never cared much for "megadungeons," personally find them dopey, so never got roped into the Dwimmermount fiasco. Frankly found the dungeon as described in his blog to be uninspired at best, so never understood all the hype and interest. Still, as I say, I found some value in his blog.

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  5. I'd love to see them stop rewriting D&D and acting like it's something new.

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    1. I think the game is to rewrite D&D in such a way that it is something new!

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