Death is on the Table
I wanted to share a little mechanic from a rather defunct RPG project I was working on a few years ago with Matt.
Starting a Campaign at Higher Levels
I’m interested in running some old-school D&D with higher-level PCs. A lot of the OSR’s knowledge has been derived through analyses of, and practice with, low-level play. My experience running OSR games has been that as PCs reach “mid” levels, say level 5 or so, a lot of the principles that held true through the earlier stages of the game become less effective. This has contributed to my losing confidence and the eventual petering out of more than one campaign.
The F**kscourse Continues
I’m back on this and you can’t stop me. Join me as I continue to wade through the refuse of my own thinking.
F**k-you is a Writing Concept
Something very interesting has emerged from the conversation about my post on fuck-you design:
“Fuck-you” isn’t a design concept.
Another Shot at Theorizing the OSR
Some interesting conversation recently around the “nature” of the OSR. This topic waxes and wanes, and will probably never really be settled, but for what it’s worth (almost nothing) I’d like to share a thought that occured to me as I was reading Brendan’s post on the topic.
Like Richard, I have my attachments to the term OSR. I’m not convinced by Marcia’s positioning of that attachment along the axis of an originary myth, accurate or otherwise. As Brendan notes in the post linked above, such originary claims can be made after the fact. In other words, they might more accurately be interpreted as speech or textual acts that mediate an ongoing social formation, rather than telling its history.
F**k-You Design
I want to talk about a long-standing tendency that’s been bothering me in OSR-inflected design spaces.
Doing the Impossible
Lately I've been riding the bandwagon of interest in FKR-inspired design. I'm especially intrigued by diegetic advancement. This is a concept that holds a lot of promise in terms of replacing my least favourite legacy system: XP. However, I'm not convinced diegetic advancement has quite arrived in terms of implementation.
My only take on AC
I can't believe I'm even writing about ascending/descending AC. Blame Marcia, who's doing some fascinating work with the old Chainmail tables.
D&D Theology in The Raven Tower
Ann Leckie's The Raven Tower is a short fantasy novel told from the perspective of a demigod. Like all her other novels, it is a deft and thoughtful exploration of a way of being fundamentally different from our own. More relevant to this blog, it is also a compelling account of how deities (and their clerics) in your standard D&D setting might work.
Ideating City Adventures, or 12 Ruinations of Pumpai
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