Request for 3-hour islets

A post at Planet Algol asked: does the OSR need an adventure path? It's not a bad idea, if—as migellito suggested—we use Telecanter's idea of an island hopping campaign:

what if there were one page island and people wrote a bunch of them. Then you might have a campaign that you could pick and choose from a variety of isles.

A bunch of us recently posted one hour dungeon maps. Will anyone join me in jump starting the island hopping "Sea of Os'r" project with a 3-hour islet? (See the Wikipedia islet page for some inspiration.)

UPDATE: I finished my first islet, Isle of the Oxuders.

UPDATE 2: Lands of Ara is hosting the Sea of Os'r Adventure Path page. Check it out!

Do We Need Another Retro-Clone? (A Postmortem)

TLDNR: yes, but not from me.

Some bemoan the burgeoning number of clone rules. It's not something I worry about. The OSR isn't susceptible to damage from market fragmentation or brand diffusion or whatever. Until recently, in fact, I was writing my own near clone of the 1974 books (more on that later).

Whatever your opinion about the proper number of retro-clones, none of the existing ones closely replicate the original three booklets. Labyrinth Lord OEC and S&W Whitebox are great, but they're still mashups of the LBB's, the Supplements, Moldvay Basic, and other ingredients. That's fine. I could be happy playing LL. However, a true clone of the LBB's needs to embrace the following:

1. Constraints: stick to only the monsters and spells found in the three booklets, for example.
2. Omissions: the LBB's implicitly or explicitly reference rules found in Chainmail, for example, while other topics are nowhere to be found. (I'm looking at you, Initiative.) The authors of a close clone would need to decide whether to leave those things out, include the Chainmail material (which isn't always an exact fit), or to suggest solutions from later editions as sidebars or appendices.
3. Ambiguities: must be preserved. Let individual referees rule on when elves can swap classes.
4. Obsolescences: a number of rules didn't survive edition zero, and don't appear in the existing retro-clones. Many are minor. Some of them deserve to be forgotten, others are interesting. For example, I haven't seen cloned anywhere the rules for stocking guards/retainers into the "castles" marked on the Outdoor Survival board.

Those were some of the considerations I had in mind when I started work on my clone of the 1974 rules. I never thought my clone would be profitable, or even see wide use. I took on the project as a way to enrich my games by getting back to the roots of the hobby, and to satisfy my curiosity. I also wanted to give people who had never seen them access to the first rules, particularly since WotC stopped selling the PDF's.

I finished writing a rough draft of the rules from the first two volumes, and made notes on the third. Last night, I decided to abandon the project.

There are several reasons.* I pushed hard to finish volume 2 over the holidays, so I'm a little burned-out. The recent shouts of too many retroclones made me less motivated to release something that would be received with hostility rather than indifference. Finally, although I learned a lot about the early rules, I realize I'll never be able to resist tinkering with the rules long enough to get an authentic early gameplay experience (particularly in light of my growing fondness for the LoFP rules).

So, the only goal I haven't accomplished with this project is to share what I learned. I have a few ideas about how to repurpose and distribute the work. It might be a series of monographs, things like Initiative Through the Ages or The Evolution of the Cleric. I can even imagine a web app and database that would let referees select the rules they want, then spit out a custom PDF. (That's something I have the expertise to make, but probably not the time.) Whatever form this stuff eventually takes, I'll allow myself more editorial creativity than the "strict preservationism" of my abortive clone attempt. I'll also make sure that it's easy to loot for kitbashing.

I hope someone releases a close clone of the 1974 rules. I also recommend attempting to write a clone as an educational experience for anyone with some curiosity about it. It taught me more about he game than I would have suspected—historical rules trivia, sure, but also how damn elegant the thing is under the hood. As an experience, it made me realize what an enormous amount of work people like Dan Proctor put into their projects; there's a hell of a lot more involved that simply paraphrasing someone else's text.

* I should also add that it's really, really hard to resist clarifying or filling lacunae when trying to recreate these rules. If you want something that's faithful to the LBB's as historical documents and is also a playable game, you must trust referees to make their own rulings.

Originality and the OSR

A flurry of recent posts complain about originality, or the lack thereof, in the OSR. I experienced mild anger reading those, and have now thought it through enough to articulate some of the reasons for that anger. I'm not trying to pick a fight with anyone; this is just a bit of catharsis.

1. For me, the appeal of the OSR is substantially about exploring the roots of a hobby I enjoy. There's room within that goal for originality in the form of creative revisionism or imagining alternate histories of the hobby, but my enjoyment is not dependent upon those things.
2. Copyright issues push my buttons. To say that retro-clones are stealing intellectual property by exploiting a loophole in the OGL shows a poor understanding of both the license and the concept of copyright as a public good. I find it in poor taste to blames dismal sales of a new fantasy game on thieving retro-clone authors. What does such a stance really mean—that classic D&D should go out of print, forcing everyone to play new games that otherwise can't compete with it? As much as many people are enured to its charms, D&D is a well designed game, and something new will not necessarily be better. Novelty is not in itself meritorious.
3. That the OSR is adding to the existing mountain of adventure modules that involve going into a dungeon to kill humanoids does not prey upon my mind. Nor does it bother me that people charge money for such things. Even in a relatively small market like the OSR, the internet effectively separates the wheat from the chaff. Coming from content producers, this amounts to the charge that bad products are killing sales of good products. That's not how markets work. While innovation spurs further innovation, there's no reason to believe that sameness leads to more sameness. The non-innovators copy the innovators, not the other way around.
4. In these complaints, I also detect a resentment of amateurism (amaeteurism in the best, Lovecraftian sense). How to compete with free is a problem that has occupied many industries in recent years, including the software industry and journalism. Cheap and free desktop publishing software will not go away. There are ways to compete with free, but smearing amateurs is not one of them. No one owes you a living.
5. Finally, my anger was about being forced to recognize my dissatisfaction with my private campaign, which is really the heart of the matter, and something I'll post about tomorrow.

Search the OSR

Google offers a feature called custom search, which allows you to specify a list of sites to search. I created an OSR Search for dozens of old-school blogs and forums.

OSR bibliography

An annotated bibliography of OSR material is a great idea.

Trading on design

In a reply to my post from yesterday, Scott of Huge Ruined Pile (who himself recently penned something of an apologia for nostalgia) predicted a move to "more modern-looking" OSR products. There's good design and bad design. Good design is aesthetically appealing and functional. In the case of game covers, the function is to communicate the nature of the content. What is the game about? Is it the sort of thing I would like? Here are a couple of current Swords & Wizardry products: The design of both these products effectively communicates what they're about. They're fantasy adventure games, with an old-school flavor. I also find them aesthetically pleasing per se, apart from the nostalgia factor. The boxed set has a clean, balanced design which does its job even when considered in isolation from the 1974 box. Granted, most of the people buying these products are familiar with the earlier works they reference. But that's true of any package design. You sell an unfamiliar product by creating associations in the minds of consumers. Leaving aside whether they are good or bad design (relative to the S&W covers or on their own), what associations do these "modern" Frog God Games covers evoke? These covers capitalize on a design aesthetic that was popularized around 2001 with the boom of 3e products. No doubt the designs create the desired associations in their audience. My concern is that—however much we would like to see Swords & Wizardry realize the volume of sales 3e publishers saw—the design aesthetic of the Frog God Games products would less effectively communicate the appeal of S&W than the existing Mullen cover. If you think the Swords & Wizardry packaging is derivative (I don't—it's nostalgic but not derivative), is it better to jump from one derivative design to another derivative design of slightly more recent vintage? I don't ask that rhetorically. (In case you haven't seen it, the art for the new Swords & Wizardry cover is shown in my last post.)