I have been buying RPG products for 30 years now. A friend called me out recently by identifying me as a big-spender among what I had thought was a pretty hard core group. I felt very seen, so time to look at what all this has taught me (if anything).
In common with a few things about gaming recently, Against the Wicked City in the OSR articulated the phrase that nailed what I had been feeling and the scales fell from my eyes - "conceptual density" - that an RPG product "contents need to be something better than you could come up with, unaided, simply by following cliches and/or random madlibbing". The blog post uses the exemplary Hill Cantons as an example which I would agree with but also take it a level further - in that Hill Cantons was inspired by Slavic warbear art; why not go direct to the source?
Art books and illustrated fables are almost as good as a dedicated RPG product - examples that I realise are sunk deep into my mind are:
- The Book of Conquests by Jim Fitzpatrick - based on the early mythological cycle of Irish stories. Epic, gorgeous, full stop.
- Wherever you can find Arthur Rackhams illustrations - I think I know him from Oscar Wildes fairy tales?
Lizardman Diaries brings the concept into play well with 'visual quirk generators' - an example of this is the Transient Bazaar - putting a grid over suitably evocative images to randomly find on-theme inspiration.
The key point here is that all of this more or less abandons crunch. No new rules, nor classes nor anything, this is purely about inspiration. I have shelves upon shelves of rules and I realised I have jettisoned or never activated most of them. In another piece of insight that helped me clarify what I had felt as a hunch - I do not need more mechanics because basically everything can be a bear.
Even in Planescape which I ran a lot, even during a relatively crunchy phase, the fiddly rules about magic items power waning and waxing across different locations, spells requiring keys and clerics being hamstrung by distance from their deity got mostly left at the door. What I did use, and all the time, were the lore descriptions, what the monsters were *like*, where they lived, what conditions on the planes were, in what nooks and crevasses could someone survive on, say, Pandemonium or Gehenna. There were some mechanical rules but if you were contesting the environment regularly, you were going to lose eventually.
I realise what I will buy a product for has evolved now that I know what I like. Of old I loved the Planescape Monstrous Compendiums; simply looking at entries in the monstrous compendiums and thinking about what those critters would do in the wild. I bought Midnight, Ptolus, and a bunch of other weighty books and found myself never using them. I now realise because I could not find art within that drove me. Ptolus because everything was already detailed out, cross referenced and pinned out like a conspiracy room. Great for what it is - not what I love. What I need are ideas to make it feel different, an element of randomness to kick me out of the rut of my own habits that I would drift towards without guidance.
Of supplements I own, going by what looks most raggedy, the most use I got of old was from:
The Planewalker's Handbook
Planescape Monstrous Compendium Appendix
Planescape Monstrous Compendium Appendix II
Planes of Chaos
Maybe I should have just bought DiTerlizzi artbooks.
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