My Own Personal OSR

To mark the 4th anniversary of spinning up this blog I thought I would talk about what the OSR means to me since this is maybe, kinda an OSR blog.

I'm picking this up on the back of the 'splinter in my mind' that was Yora's toot "I am one of the people who think OSR is a meaningless term and shouldn't be used." I find this odd because Spriggan's Den is an exemplar of the type of blog I would hope to see when I search on the term.

So why would I tag this an OSR blog? Because I know what I look for when I trawl across blogs and I find it on blogs that post under the OSR tag - and I want to do that too.

Ok - so what do I look for out there? I look for the community of practice of running a good game. OSR is useful to me in that it is a label that points to people who create old school tools - light, creative aids with a massive span of subject matter. On an OSR blog I'm likely to get a couple of spark lists and some weird mechanic to run jousting with ogres.

I may also find shelfies of original documents, yet another retroclone, screeds about how people are playing the game wrong - this is the rock matrix around my gold nugget, the dross that must be cleared away to get to the good stuff. That is fine, better to know that there is some gold in here if you look than have there be nothing at all.

This has been discussed by more erudite folk than I such as recently on Traverse Fantasy's piece on the OSR being different things to different people and their addendum with the key point "aren't you tired of being restrained by the same cyclical discourse about the OSR? Don't you just want to go ape-shit?" - similar to Richard's Dystopian Pokeverse point that "once you make a category like OSR, people will use it, outside your control."

In the past four years of blogging, I mostly write about four types of things:
- I trawl the net for data so that we can have some grounding to make some assertions about what has happened in the past, what is happening around us now
- I review things that appeal to my magpie sensibilities
- I document lessons I have learned in trying to run an enjoyable game at my table
- I try to create tools for fellow game-masters

One could argue the OSR is present only in the last of these, one could argue it perhaps informs the last three.

When I think of the OSR, and the point of it, it is the #DIYRPG tag that is the flag I follow - tools to help people make their own games.

I have always run homebrew - by the time I started in the early 90s there was already too much lore out there for Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms that I could neither afford to buy nor wanted to learn. So I developed my game in isolation - we were on the long, narrow end of a content pipe - with source material being a lot more Appendix N than official supplements. I guess my first 'phase' of gaming ran from this home-brew start up through a decade of Planescape to a pause due to work. The OSR was one of the things I stumbled over during the 4e era while I was not playing so much, then put it into practice when I re-started gaming.

The first element of the OSR that brought me joy was when these old supplements were re-released on DriveThruRPG. Here, finally I could back-fill the few Planescape pieces I missed, the Spelljammer bits I passed over and actually get my hands on.

The next was the discovery of blogs like Goblinpunch afire with weirdness, but weirdness I could use - things that jolted me out of any creative rut and got me rolling looking at other things.

The articulated principles of play was the next - unscripted, sandboxy - but also with more thought into which bits fit together to make what style of play, what experience at the table.

This is what I come to the OSR for - the generators, the tools to create your own things. To me the epitome of what I sought from the OSR is In Corpathium on Last Gasp Grimoire - published in October 2014 followed by the Infinigrad series on Lizardman Diaries, started in 2013, the core done in 2016-2017.

I read mainstream D&D stuff and while it is also a fount of homebrew, the content thrown out is constrained - monsters, feats, player classes, spells. Additive things in the vein of the core rules. Discrete elements - which can be excellent - but feel to me more like decals than the OSR-ish paintbox.

What I turn to the OSR today for is the random generators, the themes, the faction creators, the world-building. A great example of this is d4 Caltrops with their un-ending random tables - and also guidance on how to make tables!

The mainstream wants to give me packaged content, often sell it to me. The OSR wants to give me the tools to DIY. What I want are tools to feed tables that poke and pry at their world, not those that wait for the plot to happen to them.

So what is this place for? Hopefully to help you get more good gaming in by either sharing lessons learned that help you at your table or ideas that spark inspiration on your part. All to the ultimate objective of getting more gaming in.