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Dumarest said:
Is it kosher to copy my posts about Golden Heroes and Flashing Blades onto my blog if I ever get around to bothering with one? I figure with my interest in games no one else gives a hoot about, I should be able to maximize my readership at three people within five years. :wink:
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Why would you think your posts wouldn't be "yours"?
 
Dumarest said:
Is it kosher to copy my posts about Golden Heroes and Flashing Blades onto my blog if I ever get around to bothering with one? I figure with my interest in games no one else gives a hoot about, I should be able to maximize my readership at three people within five years. :wink:
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It's your writing, so put it where you want. I am working on a blog myself, but I am writing ahead on content to have a backlog before I start publishing. I plan to post the entries both here and on my blog. They'll get more eyeballs and discussion here, but the blog will make an easier archive if I want to link to things later.
 
Dumarest said:
https://honorandintrigue.blogspot.com/?m=1 is another good swashbuckling blog. Although focused on a game called Honor & Intrigue, which I have not experienced, the posts are easily usable for Flashing Blades or other systems as lot of it is just background research already done for you.
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I’m not much for the buckling of swashes, but the mention of these makes me miss Bren and BV.
 
natty bodak said:
I’m not much for the buckling of swashes, but the mention of these makes me miss Bren and BV.
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Are they not around anymore? Black Vulmea offered to run that online Merc game after I reviewed it on therpgsite and then kind of faded away slowly and then all at once.
 
Dumarest said:
Are they not around anymore? Black Vulmea offered to run that online Merc game after I reviewed it on therpgsite and then kind of faded away slowly and then all at once.
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Yeah I was looking forward to that game. Bummer it stalled.
 
Dumarest said:
Are they not around anymore? Black Vulmea offered to run that online Merc game after I reviewed it on therpgsite and then kind of faded away slowly and then all at once.
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Ah, it’s me that’s not around so much anymore, and when I am around it’s mostly here.

I assume and hope they’re both kicking around lively somewhere.
 
Bunch said:
Yeah I was looking forward to that game. Bummer it stalled.
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We got a handful of posts in, basically responding to the want ad and being hired for the job, then...pfft!
 
Even the great bloggers pad their blogs with filler occasionally. Humans are fickle creatures. If they see a blog hasn’t been updated in a couple weeks, they are more likely to forget about it. That was one of the things James Maleszeswki did well with his Grognardia blog.He would do some thought provoking stuff and then he would do these “remember this game?” posts where he would talk about how he saw a game in a store and never played it, with a short history of the game that could have been copy and pasted off a Wikipedia page. Low effort but it kept people coming back to read his better stuff.
 
Voros said:
In Places Deep is pretty cool, for instance the Rawhead is a Barker-inspired monster.
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Barker's "Rawhead Rex" was in turn inspired by old (Northern) English folktales of Rawhead-and-Bloody-Bones, which was the entire name of a single entity (in most stories). These later migrated to the Southern US as two distinct but linked creatures. I don't think they were super-popular so the tales are kind of vague and few in number. I put them in my own adventure The Magician's House as unseelie-type faerie brothers, their forms inspired partly by the folktales and partly by the Barker story. That's because my adventure was also inspired by Susanna Clark's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, in which a faerie character offhandedly mentions it as a possible form to take when engaging his nemesis.
 
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Dumarest said:
We got a handful of posts in, basically responding to the want ad and being hired for the job, then...pfft!
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Yeah, I'm really sorry I let that drop. The campaign's still up on RPOL - rereading our posts, I could hear ol' Paddy Curran's voice in my head again . . .

Voros said:
snipped - BV
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Are you offering this as an example of an 'OSR blog'?
 
I intended to post it to the more generic blog thread but what'cha going to do?
 
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Voros said:
I intened to post it to the more generic blog thread but what'cha going to do?
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Oh, I dunno, maybe not link a blog where the blogger writes stuff like, " Nowadays, dungeon masters like me stretch to keep one or two absent PCs from upsetting our game’s plot," and the readers don't post replies like, "When D&D started to change from a roll-play to a role-play experience, Megadungeons became a hindrance, because it’s exceptionally difficult to tell a good story within such a limited space," in a thread about OSR blogs?

Pro tip: That's kinda rude.

There's some decent stuff here - his post about Lee Gold and Lands of Adventure is fascinating, and in some of his posts he makes a real effort at offering ways to make the reader's game more interesting, which is always terrific - but despite the fact that our pedigrees' are similar, this seems to be someone who, like James Maliszewski, didn't seem to really grok pre-2e D&D - like this and this - and, unlike Maliszewski, doesn't seem to have re-evaluated that opinion.

And that's fine, as far as it goes. No one has to like those games. Clearly later editions come closer to this guy's sweet spot, and more power to him for that. Shine on, you crazy diamond. Again, some of his posts are pretty good, in a general gaming way.

But does that sound like an OSR blogger to you?
 
Voros said:
Here is a cool blog Late Night Zen which I believe is ran by our own spittingimage spittingimage who was perhaps too humble to post about it here?
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Heh. It was more like "should I share my thoughts on old school roleplaying, which I discovered a few months ago, with people who've been playing that way since the 80s? Or should I not try to teach my grandma to suck eggs?"
 
This has been around for years (although sadly Andy seems to have got bored and stopped updating) but I've recently been reminded it exists.

Known World, Old World has lots of content, especially for Advanced Fighting Fantasy.
 
A new, critical review focused site/blog with some good designers involved.

As I've mentioned before I continue to find the OSR pretty bereft of interesting theoretical or critical views so hopefully this manages to move beyond the trademark lazy thinking and cool kid posturing that has largely defined the OSR 'discourse' so far (I mean when the factually incorrect OSR Primer is one of your founding documents...).

 
That's cool. I only wish it wasn't formatted as a blog
 
Voros said:
A new, critical review focused site/blog with some good designers involved.
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Looks like an interesting blog. I could use another source for reviews.
Voros said:
As I've mentioned before I continue to find the OSR pretty bereft of interesting theoretical or critical views so hopefully this manages to move beyond the trademark lazy thinking and cool kid posturing that has largely defined the OSR 'discourse' so far (I mean when the factually incorrect OSR Primer is one of your founding documents...).

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What's factual accuracy got to do with providing useful game advice? The primary value people found in the OSR Primer was in re-opening the debate about player vs. character skill, which lead to a lot of interesting thinking about how RPGs work. That influence goes far outside the OSR scene.

Now using a document from 2008 as evidence of the moribund state of the OSR, that's lazy thinking, and taking cheap shots at the OSR is the ultimate in cool-kid posturing.
 
Endless Flight said:
Even the great bloggers pad their blogs with filler occasionally. Humans are fickle creatures. If they see a blog hasn’t been updated in a couple weeks, they are more likely to forget about it. That was one of the things James Maleszeswki did well with his Grognardia blog.He would do some thought provoking stuff and then he would do these “remember this game?” posts where he would talk about how he saw a game in a store and never played it, with a short history of the game that could have been copy and pasted off a Wikipedia page. Low effort but it kept people coming back to read his better stuff.
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The numbers drop considerably when you break between posts. I have a bad habit of posting a bunch, then stopping for extended periods, and you can go from having daily hits of hundreds or thousands, then drop down to the low tens (I must have a lot of experiencing of dropping down like that, then building back up; then dropping again). I think if someone is doing regular posts that are easy to do, but still engaging, that is a fair way to keep the blog alive.
 
Baulderstone said:
Looks like an interesting blog. I could use another source for reviews.

What's factual accuracy got to do with providing useful game advice? The primary value people found in the OSR Primer was in re-opening the debate about player vs. character skill, which lead to a lot of interesting thinking about how RPGs work. That influence goes far outside the OSR scene.

Now using a document from 2008 as evidence of the moribund state of the OSR, that's lazy thinking, and taking cheap shots at the OSR is the ultimate in cool-kid posturing.
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Fair enough, I do want more quality OSR reviews and hope they stick to that.

Most of the writers involved seem reasonable and civil online although like a lot of people online these days some are also a bit oversensitive to disagreement.

I think those who didn't come up during the time of more rough and tumble forums often seem surprised when someone even politiely disagrees with them online and seem quicker to take offense.

For that reason, note the comment about trolls, I'm surprised they've kept the comments section on. I wonder if that is just an oversight? I honestly find comment sections of blogs pretty bad, either a bunch of 'yes sirs!' or toxic trolling.

I don't see myself as out to score cool points, although I could be deluded in that regard, as any criticism of the OSR and the Primer in particular on the Pub is more likely to stir up a hornet's nest rather than a round of backpats. And seeing as I'm one of the most active posters on the OSR here to imply I hold it some animus is also odd.

But I am a contrarian and often a complainer and since I do follow the OSR a fair bit I'm probably quicker to complain about its repetitive rhetoric than most.

More fairly I think I could be accused of beating a dead horse, in which case indulge me one last time as I try to argue why I find your defense of the Primer and the quality of OSR discourse unconvincing. :dice:

Too often OSR reviews are used as launching pads for theoretical or historical claims, something the OSR does not have a good track record on when it comes to accuracy or insight.

Although to be fair my issue is that rpg fan discourse in general is so lacking in any rigour and are often taxonomic arguments which are thinly disguised attempts to prove one system or style superior to another.

So it is hardly limited to just the OSR but since D&D and D&D-adjacent play is so dominant online it is the most prevalent.

Regarding the Primer, I'd argue that when an extended section of your essay is dedicated to a mechanic that you get outright wrong that speaks volumes against your argument as it seriously damages your argument and your credibility.

This isn't some minor, technical error but a basic mistatement of a central argument of the whole Primer.

The fact that self-same error, that OD&D supposedly didn't have a die roll mechanic to find secret doors when it clearly did, from what I can see has never once been noted by those promoting its arguments, speaks to widespread sloppiness in the community discourse.

It is as if most of those promoting OD&D play and the Primer never actually read the OD&D ruleset!

And although the Primer is from 2008 it is still constantly recommended, like in this Reddit thread from 2020 where it is referred to one of two "go-to primers for understanding the OSR mindset by the OSR community."

Even one of the newbie players in my group recently started talking about looking for traps in a 'new' way and from their comments they had clearly picked up that this was some kind of new idea from the Primer. So it is far from some dead document.

Maybe I'm expecting too much from fan discourse but it seems reasonable to me to expect that people actually read the rules under discussion.

It is tiresome to find rulesets mis-stated, rumours treated as fact and truisms based in prejudice rather than, you know, actually reading or playing the games/adventures in question.

Instead we get 'DL destroyed D&D' and even things like 'the Red Box led to railroads' or 'point buy is because of video games.'

I haven't seen much evidence that the OSR has found much new to say in the last number of years in terms of play. That the Primer is still recommended as it is in the link above reinforces that point.

Personally, coming from a background of playing D&D in the 80s most the OSR 'insights' on sandboxing, dungeoncrawls, supposed lethality and the like seem rather obvious, whiteroomy or overstated.

And I'm not convinced that those self-same techniques are remotely unique to OSR play and were somehow unknown to modern players.
 
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The Red Box led to railroads???

How preposterous!!!
 
Endless Flight said:
The Red Box led to railroads???

How preposterous!!!
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That particular claim was made by one of the authors on the blog above. In general they're quite good but I find that too often when some rpg bloggers step out of what they are familiar with, they step in it.

In particular when fans attempt historical analysis they produce a lot of half-baked ideas. That is one reason the work of Jon Peterson and Ben Riggs is so valuable.

Like when Bryce of Tenfootpole claimed that "...the writing is straight out of every CoC adventure ever written. IE: bad." He later corrected himself to say he was referring to (old) CoC layout but still, that kind of sloppy writing in say, film writing, would rapidly lead to one being not taken seriously even in the amateur film blogging community.
 
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Voros said:
Playing D&D in the 80s most the OSR 'insights' on sandboxing, dungeoncrawls, supposed lethality and the like seem rather obvious, whiteroomy or overstated.
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I am not ashamed to say that when the Primer came out it sparked an interest in old school D&D that had been dead for 20 years. If I am being honest, a lot of what people had to say back in the day wasn't obvious at first because my experiences with B/X and AD&D back in the 80's were terrible. Nowadays, I am omnivorous when it comes to OSR blogs, articles, supplements etc. because I like hearing out a wide range of opinions.
 
Brock Savage said:
I am not ashamed to say that when the Primer came out it sparked an interest in old school D&D that had been dead for 20 years. If I am being honest, a lot of what people had to say back in the day wasn't obvious at first because my experiences with B/X and AD&D back in the 80's were terrible. Nowadays, I am omnivorous when it comes to OSR blogs, articles, supplements etc. because I like hearing out a wide range of opinions.
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For me I'd say some of it helped crytalize how we had developed playing by my early 20s, we just didn't have the terminolgy, heck sandbox is a fairly recent term borrowed from video games.

So the concepts were familiar for me, personally. I do think early on clariying these modes of play was helpful, but it was also far from new as Douglas Niles touched on a number of the ideas in the Wilderness Survival Guide and Jennell Jaquays and William Connors in the Campaign Sourcebook & Catacomb Guide, with a lack of polemic and more good humour.
 
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So to advance a positive example of what I'd like to see more of, besides more gameable content which is my preference, check out this impressively written and argued post on Realm of Zhu.

Here he presents some really interesting ideas that break the typical OSR-narrative of the game's beginnings and influences. Most valuably by going back to original texts and sources from the time, much as Peterson does.

So we get an intelligent discussion of FF, Tony Bath and 'dungeon-as-code.'

Here he identifies a common fallacy I think is endemic in fandom attempts at historical reading:

'There is, unfortunately something of a presentist tendency in fandoms to back-project concepts, for example there's an 'eternal discourse'* about "D&D separating from 'wargaming roots'" (as pernicious as a myth as Warhammer emerging from 'roleplaying roots') without really indicating much of an understanding that what "wargaming" really meant in 1974, or any expectation that it might actually be a bit different from the understanding somebody carries around in their head in 2021. Much same in Tolkien fandom, where The Hobbit is forced to fit into the "world" of The Lord of the Rings, while it's textual relationship to The Silmarillion is widely ignored due to authorial comments taken out of context, and that the evidence - early drafts - aren't widely read within fandom. As ever, the only way of escape these infernal traps is to actually look at the original texts.'

I have to say, it seems the Brits and Swedes are outpacing the Yanks at this point and time, often in terms of design, creativity and theory.
 
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