Old School Attraction

On June 2, 2009 a good friend and player in my long-running campaign sent me a link to Mythmere Games site. We were both old-school gamers who had started with the Holmes set (me as a kid in 1979) and he knew that I would find the entire movement exciting. I have to say that in the weeks since then I have been absolutely blown away by the creativity and passion of the Old School Renaissance. I have felt more excited about games and role-playing than I have in years and have found a new love for the possibilities of the hobby.

I have enjoyed the writing and creative works from authors like James Maliszewski, Matt Finch, and the creative teams that produced Swords and Wizardry, Labyrinth Lord, Mutant Future, Encounter Critical and the rest of the galaxy of the OSR. Coming in now gave me an advantage; there are so many products out there to stoke the creative fires and show the possibilities in the OSR. When I climbed on I got to see five issues of Fight On! and two of Knockspell – both beautiful products.

Reading things like Matt Finch’s brilliant “Primer for Old School Gaming” and the entries at places like Grognardia and others also made me realize that games are “doable” as unified creative visions rather than corporate product launches.

I have been thinking about why I felt so attracted to this movement, and why I originally left the hobby in the late 1980s.

1) It mirrors how I played anyway. When I came back to gaming again in graduate school in the late 1990s I ran a campaign that went on for 6 years using a brutal hack of Stalking the Night Fantastic that boiled down to using the character sheet and three pages from the rulebook. Those three pages, GM fiat and great players was all that was needed to run a game that started as a Top Secret/X-Files mash-up that became a dimensional-spanning crusade.

I think it was nice to learn that my decision to cut out the awful combat system and all of the rules in favor of quick resolution and on the fly rulings didn’t make me lazy – I was part of a movement!

2) I think the biggest thing that turned me off of gaming in the 1980s and what makes the draw of the OSR so powerful is the realization that I don’t want to play other people’s stories. For me, this is one of the fundamental philosophical (rather than mechanical) differences between the OSR and much of how the hobby changed in the later 1980s.

The Dragonlance modules were the perfect example –it seemed to me that you were playing someone else’s novel, rather than to making your own. I hated this.

I think I hated this because I always thought that the ideas of me and my friends were better than what we read in books or saw in movies or TV. I know that is just arrogance, but the connections I felt with the characters and plots hatched at my own dining room table were always stronger than the love I felt for something I took in from the “outside.”

I love Tolkein, I love Moorcock, I love Killraven, I love all things Zelazny and all the rest. But I would never want to play a campaign set in any of those worlds.

I have little interest in exploring the Young Kingdoms, playing in the universe of Star Wars or Star Trek, or meeting Harry Potter or Harry Dresden. I know that many people do and that they enjoy games that are set in these worlds – but they are not for me. While I have enjoyed con games or one-offs set in other people’s sandboxes, to me they feel like creative vacuums.

Of course, I steal like a bandit from these sources, but that is different. I think that the style of the OSR is not creation from whole cloth, it is pastiche. Taking some of the plots from here, a cool laser sword from there, an NPC from here and then making something new, something created at your table that is different from anywhere else.

I think the trend of the 1980s – of prepackaged stories set in completely fleshed out world – left me cold. I think the passion for chasing licenses – whether Elric, Robotech, Hawkmoon, Star Wars, Star Trek, Amber, Battlestar Galactica or whatever – seemed like a creative dead end to me.

All of the heavy lifting was done. But the lifting (the heavier the better) is what made me fall in love with the hobby. I loved the worlds my players and I created because they were uniquely ours. What made them real, what made them matter, was the work we put in creating them in the first place.

I am interested in reading about Gygax’s original campaign (and can’t wait for Rob Kuntz to put out his next original Greyhawk Castle level.) I will snap up the Machine Level when it appears and I hope to steal as much as I can carry from it. I am interested as a player, a GM and a historian, but I am not interested in running it as a campaign.

I am fascinated in what is happening in Carcosa, Dwimmermount, Formalhaut and elsewhere – I would love to visit these places, but I have to build my own home.

There are also mechanical things I love about the OSR, but this was one of the real realizations I had in catching up on the movement and reading all of the fine work that has already come out.