New Kid on the Blogck: My Path to the OSR

December 7, 2021 W. F. Smith

I began this blog exactly one year ago today. My inaugural post was a humble report from my sojourns through the Ultraviolet Grasslands as I playtested an early version of the Prismatic Wasteland system. I am undeniably late to the blogging scene, arriving at least three years after articles like “The Rise and Fall of the Blog”, which is by no means the first proclamation that blogging is a lost art. But within the OSR scene (or its remnants), blogs are still somewhat vibrant even after the collapse of the G+ ecosystem (and the many predators lurking in said ecosystem). Many blogs went dark long before I even rolled my first non-d6 die, but there is still so much on offer in this rich, decaying ecosystem. I have been greeted with nothing but warmth over the past year, and I appreciate it. As a celebration of (or as atonement for) my first year blogging, I will answer a question no one asked: Who are you, and what are you doing on my blog feed (or whatever it is that brought you here)?

Step 1: Improv and Board Games

Just as every dungeon needs an entrance (preferably several), any path to the OSR (or Post-OSR) needs an entry point into the hobby of tabletop games. This isn’t that. An often overlooked aspect of dungeon design, but just as important as entrances, is where you are entering the dungeon from. The environs surrounding the dungeon. The dungeon lurks below the surface, but what and/or who is on the surface? What do you find when leaving the dungeon? In my extended analogy, the environs surrounding the dungeon are my own hobbies and preferences that I brought with me when first experiencing the hobby. In my case, it was primarily an abiding love of improv theatre, which I began doing seriously in the beginning of high school, and board games (mostly and increasingly the types of board games that board game snobs play, not your Monopolies or your Lives, those games for the hoi polloi). These are still activities that I enjoy and immerse myself in when opportunities present themselves. Improv is a very freeing activity, a highly creative and collaborative one, and even humorous from time to time. The board games I enjoy can be competitive or cooperative, but they are always quite structured and the good ones have rules and mechanisms that satisfyingly slot into place. I know that my proto-tabletop interests continue to shape my own play style, as both a player and referee, and that my play style would likely be different in ways probably impossible to predict if I were more into, for instance, LARPing or anime instead.

Step 2: Dungeons & Dragons, Third and One-Half Edition

On the first week of my freshman year of college, a friend introduced me, my partner, and several others to the exciting world of tabletop games. Or at least, it felt like it should be exciting. This friend had learned D&D from his own pater familias some years prior but was not himself a natural at the art of refereeing. He would constantly get frustrated at us for not following the story beats he played out and was reticent in the extreme to bend to the players’ collective will. In our first session, he described the dog-like yapping of the kobolds in the cave. At the time, we were truly unacquainted with all the trappings of kobolds that are taken for granted by the veteran player, and mistook them for non-sentient creatures and potential pets. So we tried very hard to capture one and make it our pet. My referee friend made every attempt to dissuade us from our goal, but after an entire session of all the players working toward this end, he finally relented (looking back, I think a generous reading of his actions was that he was preventing us from doing something pretty fucked up. But he could have also signaled that these were sentient creatures and not instead give every indication that they were scaly, yapping dogs that walked on their hind legs). Another time, when we refused to take the MacGuffin to its intended destination, he cursed us, with no save or action allowed to prevent it. The particulars are hazy, but I recall that my bard lost the ability to use their voice, which was quite the penalty. And it probably didn’t help that no one but this friend knew the rules. I recall that every time he would ask me what my armor class was to determine whether an attack hit, I would reply “studded leather.”

Unsurprisingly, this campaign fell apart. But with the PDFs of the 3.5 rules on my laptop, I began to get curious and read them myself. It was the monster manual that really made me want to run my own campaign. So after a month or so after the first game collapsed, I suggested that I try my hand at running a game. That game led to a campaign that lasted for the next several years, until all the players were around level 14 (by the books, no milestone XP or what-have-you). Nowadays, when I see the level of needless complexity in 3.5, I was surprised I was ever able to grok it. Just look at a 3.5 stat block sometime—your head will likely spin.

Step 3: D&D Next/Dungeons & Dragons, 5th Edition

After the action-packed conclusion of my first campaign in which the players slew a god (I basically ran them through a modified Red Hand of Doom, but with Vecna as the recurring villain behind everything), it was about the time that the Sorcerers on the Seashore were playtesting a new edition of Dungeons & Dragons, tentatively titled D&D Next. I remember being truly wowed the first time I read the playtest packets. So simplified! So streamlined! After years of 3.5, the much-touted “bounded accuracy” seemed truly miraculous. We began a new campaign, set in the same world as the first but a generation later. Which is a good way to run a campaign if you have the same set of players—a lot of the buy-in is transferred over and players love to see the impact their previous characters had on the world. But that was only the first of several campaigns I ran in this new edition, which would later be known as the 5th (and, as of writing, current) edition of Dungeons & Dragons.

This was the game I played the most ,and it is unlikely that it will ever be topped in that respect. During my 5e era, I ran (A) a 3-year campaign in a quasi-trad style for a group of war gamers, (B) two simultaneous groups in the same setting, where the actions of each group impacted the other, and (C) a 60-player game in the West Marches style with two other assistant DMs where we had a shared set of notes to keep the setting consistent between so many games. I also played in several games, but 80% of my time gaming was in the referee capacity. I think back fondly on these games, though I doubt they could be recreated by anyone other than college students. I continued to play after college (and grad school), but it was in the more typical mode of weekly games with the same group of players each week.

I became increasingly unhappy with the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons and began to homebrew my own rules and subsystems each week. I remember once bringing a new subsystem (which I now recognize as a procedure) for wilderness exploration to the table and a player remarked “I feel like you don’t actually like Dungeons & Dragons.” And they were right, sort of. I don’t like any of the versions of Dungeons & Dragons made by other people. I love my own, auteur Dungeons & Dragons. I just did not know it at the time.

Step 4: Dungeon World

During this era of dissatisfaction, I began to look for a replacement to suit my needs and found Dungeon World. Dungeon World is not really my cup of tea, but it was very different and I was excited to run it. We had our first session in early March of 2020. After that all sessions were virtual for obvious reasons. What I did like from Dungeon World were the principles it provided. GM advice, such as “Draw Maps, Leave Blanks,” really unlocked a new mode of play for me, bringing my improv instincts back to the foreground. That campaign was one of the most dynamic and exciting games I’ve ever run. I hope I will never forget how the players fomented a revolution in their hometown and stormed the city’s senate (this was in April 2020, so resemblance to more recent events is unintentional albeit unfortunate) and took over as their catfolk wizard died as a martyr on the senate gallery. During this time, I began to become aware of other games from this same lineage—games such as Blades in the Dark or Babes in the Wood. My eyes were slowly opening, but I was waiting for something. The most important games I discovered at this time were Perilous Wilds (a great supplement that is nominally for Dungeon World but applicable to any elfgame) and Freebooters on the Frontier, both by Jason Lutes.

Step 5: Ultraviolet Grasslands

Something caught my eye on May 1, 2020. On May Day, I saw that there was a free game released to commemorate International Workers’ Day: Ultraviolet Grasslands. Flipping through the PDF, I was hooked immediately. Every part of it was incredibly evocative from the art to the rules for caravans to the anti-canon worldbuilding. I just had to order the physical book and I just had to back Luka Rejec (the author and artist) on patreon, and I just had to devour everything he ever wrote. After I emerged from my UVG-induced coma, I already had a 20-page-or-so long document that would become the Prismatic Wasteland. I began to spend almost every spare hour working on my own system-slash-setting and, eventually, recruited some friends to explore the Vastlands with me, using a very-early-alpha version of the Prismatic Wasteland rules. By that point, I had fully discovered the OSR, all the ancient blogposts, the various cool systems and adventures and miscellany that had come out right under my nose all those years I had been playing the 3.5th and 5th editions of Dungeons & Dragons. The Questing Beast YouTube channel was certainly an invaluable avenue in getting up to speed on all the books that had come out. But almost everyone, it seemed, had a blog. Clearly if this was a scene I was interested in joining, I needed one too.

Step 6: Full Blown Blogger

So I started a blog. It’s as simple as that. This isn’t, and never will be, my job, so I post as much or as little, as consistently or as infrequently as I like. I also joined Twitter and various discord servers, which although insular seems to be where a lot of the conversation takes place in the post-G+, post-OSR scene. I’ve even made friends since starting this blog, friends who are generous with their time and thoughts, and who make me a better designer and clarify my own rough thoughts on TTRPGs. I do most of my gaming these days with people I have never met in-person, which is new for me, but it is so rewarding to play with all these people who are just as bonkers for this niche hobby within a only-slightly-less-niche hobby as I am.

Here is a numbered list, in honor of my first year of blogging. Perhaps I’ll do an entirely different numbered list next year. Perhaps the occasion will pass by unmentioned.