Many Faces of the OSR

tl;dr: "OSR" is a banner flown over many folk, often unalike, occasionally strongly opposed - generalisations do not come easily.

Elmcat did a thing - Mapping the Blogosphere - pulled in a lot of blog feeds, looked at who linked to who, over a good long block of time. Threw them into some network-detecting software and out pops a neat hex of communities.

Noting the caveats of link-rot, blog-deletion, loss of G+, etc. that mean this is not the complete picture of all online effort around the thing known as the OSR, we can still discern a couple of true-enough to be useful facts.

First, this lets us put some kind of shape to the unsurprising intuition that there are a number of separate communities that travel under the banner of the OSR - some overlap more or less with others.

Second, there have been pulses of activity, some of these groups within the wider blogosphere are differentiated in time more than any approach to gaming.

Adapted from original logo by Matt Jackson

I hacked together the mashup above to reflect the truth, that whatever other facts there are, there are at least six meanings someone could have when they say OSR, one for each of those communities. From that persons point of view they are correct, that was a reflection of their experience of the OSR, thought it might have been a time and a community that is no longer extant. Another person going looking for just that OSR will not find it today, only its shadow, but that does not make the first person wrong.

We have a multitude beneath the OSR umbrella - and Elmcat's work gives us a sense of which bits were/are at the foreground and when.

We can assume that brickbats will continue to be thrown at the OSR based on the behaviours of the meanest, most unwelcoming fraction of assholes and while it is true that those folk are in there, they are not a majority and to abandon the OSR to them is to hand a great victory to a puny force. Similarly, those claims made by outsiders can now be countered with something more than vibes - they are demonstrably a small bunch of bad actors, just ignore them and soak up the rest of the good stuff in here.

Shiny TTRPG links #253

More shiny links from around the web. For yet more, see last weeks collection or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

d4 Caltrops gives us d100 - Brainfood for Burgeoning Blogs

Trick's Tales writes Seven Part Pact: An Extremely Complicated Game about Extremely Complicated Men

Connecting the Fictional Dots shares Character Death and Play Cultures

Fluorite Guillotine gives us quantum ogre reborn

Zedeck Siew Writing Hours shares TO DRINK UP THE SEA

Tree Climber gives us Alignment as Rock Paper Scissors

Messages From The Far Havens writes Being a Good Gamemaster at RPG Conventions

Wayspell gives us [HMtW] Encounters Upon the Astral Sea

Dungeon Bison shares The Map as a Tool for Conversation

monkeyX's games blog writes Gothic Feelings, Urban Nightmares: Playing in the Shadows of Buffy, Liminal & Vampire

To Be Resolved gives us Bee-Sized Anchors of Wilderness Play

I Cast Light! shares LAW, ORDER, DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: Gameable Suggestions from English Medieval Law

Review: Chapter Serf

tl;dr: delightful game to play the lowliest of servants of the grimdarks mightiest warriors.

This dropped on tumblr and I snatched it up, both expecting great things but also in fear that the scouring eye of Games Workshop might not be far behind.

This is a system light game of being one of the myriad servants who toil in the background, that the Space Marines might fight for the Emperor. After all, someone must ensure all the candles we see in every piece of art stay lit.

Zedeck wrote their thoughts in a neat blog on the genesis of the game, well worth the read. The game itself is 75 landscape pages, bright text on dark background, very much in keeping with what we have seen for in-universe technical read-outs.

Opening cinematic of the Space Marine game by Relic Entertainment

So what is all this stuff you get in the book?
4 pages of lead in - where, who, why - in general
5 pages of 'system' - split around the roles
31 pages making a d66 table of roles
14 pages of major NPCs
37 pages of setting - the Warmask of Gloriana
2 pages of thanks and 'why play this'

So what is in here chunk by chunk?

Your Sector, Your Problem - wheres my motivation?

Thinking on "Your Sector, Your Problem" (SHIELD/Stargate Command but responsible for a sector of inhabited alien worlds) in particular in the light of Uncanny Spheres MEGACORP: The Evil Mothership Campaign - why not just use that?

Uncanny Spheres portrays the dark mirror version of Mothership, scheming executives within the iconic megacorporations of that setting - and there is a ton of material there that I think I could wrangle but the 'close, but not quite' sense I get is really helpful to clarify what I am trying to get at with Your Sector, Your Problem.

The high-level pitch in 'DIO - Cosmic Defense Brigade' was "you are responsible for holding down a sector your corporation has newly acquired protectorship of and have a scarce amount of Sector Defense Assets of varying levels of effectiveness and you have to deal with all the problems that come across your desk with those."

The key difference with MEGACORP as I think about it is that even though you are representing a very large entity, an interstellar megacorp, the problems you are dealing with are greater still, so your margin for the kind of back-stabbing and internal politics that MEGACORP foregrounds is less. Not zero, but less. YSYP is like domain management on a dangerous frontier, with potentially hostile residents and unknown buried problems within your realm.

My vision for the setting is a Banksian one or "portal fantasy in spaaaace" - lots of aliens out there, not necessarily all hostile but certainly humans are only small fish in what has turned out to be a very, very big, very inhabited pond.

Shiny TTRPG links #252

More shiny links from around the web. For yet more, see last weeks collection or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Zedeck Siews Writing Hours releases CHAPTER SERF - get it while it is going!

Valeria Loves shares How to Replicate Over/Under

The Dododecahedron writes The OSR Onion

Fluorite Guillotine gives us generic play: revisiting cortex prime

glorified notepad shares d20 Ways to Get Un-RPG-stuck

Playful Void gives us How to Write a Module: An Incoherent Play-by-Play

Shadows of NyOrlandhotep asks Better Mysteries: Who cares about who did it?

Halfway Station gives us Retrospective Review: Dungeons & Dragons

A Knight at the Opera writes Happy Birthday Knight at the Opera: 6 Years of Blogging

Coins and Scrolls gives us Review: HEXplore It: Fun-Like Experiences and Shadows in the Cave

Hexcrawl '25 scramble for the finish

For Hexcrawl25, taking the challenge on I settled on the whole super-hex = 40-mile, hexes are 10-mile, sub-hexes 2.5 mile as my working scale.

Where I started

Hexmap was at 77% completion vs target of 88% - however sufficient hexes to make target *have been created* just not within the bounds of the actual challenge.

My players wandered off the south east corner and threatened to wander West, North, East and South West necessitating that I put at least some effort into the broad strokes of those directions.

However, that cuts no mustard against the challenge in hand so we need to spot our gaps and fill them pronto. Check progress since mid-year here if you like.

Happily, no hex has nothing in it, all have at least the four or so sub-hexes that their core faction inhabitants account for.

[see faction hex populating technique]

Otherwise I need to
- do 'bleed over' for more of the remaining hexes but I fell into a slightly too elaborate process for doing that - making a grid, rigorously marking out the hexes I was going to work up, figuring out all the relevant neighbours and then working down those columns. This works but is a bit time consuming and maybe we are past time to just work directly onto the map.
- fill a bunch of 'holes' left even in quite old sections of the map which are just off the beaten track that I need to fill in.
- I am going to ruthless stuff 'harbinger' hexes into all the border hexes on the edge of the map, letting me squeeze some credit for the off-map work I did

Leafwander festival for the ruin-filled swamplands (RPG Blog Carnival )

This months prompt for the RPG Blog Carnival is by the long-time host of Dice and Dragons themselves - Feasts and Festivals in Your TTRPG Campaign.

In honour of this I will be adding in a 'background festival' to tweak the existing carousing routine. My Hexcrawl25 table has proven receptive to burning off their gold for XP by carousing so I have 'used up' a fair few entries on the previous d20 Carousing table for the ruin-filled swamplands.

Inspired by player activities to trample in trade routes and try to forge a realm out of the various swamp peoples, we see a revitalisation of the old festival of Leafwander. Here herbalists of all sorts trek a great circuit of the swamps visiting all sorts of communities they would not often to swap and sample leaves, herbs, berries, roots, nuts, fruit and seeds.

Reason for Celebration: The ancient rootes of this are fey, when the veil between worlds was thinner, and the fey courts visited. Now it is an early harvest festival, effectively marking the end of the summer markets. The number of travellers abroad for Leafwander is taken as an omen of how hard the winter will be, that generosity to strangers now will bring a good harvest. While not wrong, the truth is that hard times and unrest block travellers and herald foraging parties taxing the harvests and/or slaying / drafting the farmers.

Traditions and Rituals: Mostly marked by hanging out dried sprigs from doorways and setting an extra place at the table in case of a traveller. Should a travelling herbalist turn-up, often there will be an improptu gathering at a hosts house, with samples of all the best local things brought to try, news and tales exchanged, music played and the herbalists wares tried.

Herbalists themselves partaking of Leafwander will wear a crown of simple greenery - grass, common leaves or twigs - that they make afresh after each sharing. A traveller with a wilted crown will often be stopped by whatever others they meet - be they shepherds or charcoalers - to share whatever they have.

Atmosphere: for a smaller place, Leafwander will strongly resemble a village feast with the wanderer presiding. For large places, where many travellers have come together, Leafwander more resembles a market that goes on into the small hours with little to no coin changing hand. Strange smells of smokes and scents of teas are common, as cookfires roasting and boiling a variety of oddly spiced dishes. Weirder things like biting and stinging insects and frogs to be licked may also be found, at the asking of seekers, rarely openly offered.

Leafwander typically extends over a week, often sprawling to ten-days, as a relatively relaxed celebration of the variety of herbs, spices and food to be found in the swamp-lands.

At table

Thematically this is a small festival that can be used as a back-drop for other events or - as I need - something to modify and renew an existing carousing table - use as you see fit.

d6 twists to carousing during the Leafwander Festival
1. A provider of fine (strong) cigar-like leafs is here, enthusiastically joining in and rendering all proceedings somewhat breathless and dizzy.
2. An acrid tarpot burns beneath a pan of bubbling frog-sweat. Needles dipped and licked render participants langorous and intensely focussed.
3. A somewhat jittery traveller is serving a very spicy stew, giving handfuls of spicy leaves to everyone and insisting folk use them if people start acting not themselves.
4. A serpent-folk purveyor offers oddly-fitting vials filled with herb-steeped nectars, invigorating and clearing the mind.
5. A young herbalist toting an enormous ancient tome offers cold-teas brewed in pitcher-plants, astringent, calming and mildly-painkilling, they quiz people a little impolitely on how they like what they try.
6. A swamp trader with a wide range of goblin fare - fruit, seed and root combinations that yield psychadelic results, no two the same nor any effect replicable in true goblin fashion.