The Old School Renaissance Will Eat Itself

I love all the old school renaissance / retro-clone games out there. They are great fun to play AND are very clever adaptations of the very flexible OGL. There are some neat game-design choices too, such as Spellcraft & Swordplay's alternate evolution of OD&D or Basic Fantasy's middle ground between Basic D&D and Advanced D&D. I love these games.

It's the people I am not overly fond of.

Now to be fair, it isn't everyone, or even a majority, but rather a very, very small but very, very vocal minority that seems to have this "it's my way or the highway" mentality. Or that somehow the design changes of *D&D were done not to improve gameplay but rather some nefarious plot to screw Gygax, Arneson, or whomever or screw the players out of more money, or insert crazy conspiracy here. But there have been a few dust-ups of late on what the OSR "Really" is or what "playing D&D is really about". As a gamer and a designer I pay attention to these things, they are the pulse of what the customer likes. It is the closest thing I have to market research, but as a fan they really irritate me.

I LIKE the old school games. I liked them then and I like them now, both the originals and the clones. I like the divergent evolutions, the what-ifs and the thought experiments that we get in game design from the OSR.

I DO play them out of nostalgia. Don't know why "nostalgia" became such a bad word in the OSR, but I play these games because I enjoyed them when I was 10.

I DO play new games. I love D&D 4e. And to me it plays great, I have a wonderful "D&D experience" (what ever the fuck that is supposed to be) with it. I like minis, they make my game fun. And I used them back in the 80's too. So to me, they ARE old school.

I like to write for both. Every game I work on serves a different need, different function for me. If I am not going to quantify which one is "better" to me as the creator, then why should I expect the player to do so?

Lots of people would love to play these old games too. Why? Because they were fun, and still are. But trying to get a gamer to play by telling him or her that they should play this way or that way and the game they are playing now is for idiots isn't going to win you any fans. And if you are publishing then fans > customers, so the less you have one, the less you have of the others and customers mean sales.

I am not naming names at all, cause that is tacky (but man are there plenty of good examples), but we have some people in this movement that will be the death of this movement due to their own inflexible thinking. Which is odd, cause one of the reasons they claim to like the OSR was because the rules are more flexible. Actually it's not that odd at all come to think of it.

I just don't follow the logic of "the old-school/70's games were fun, therefore the newer games are crap".

It doesn't help that many of the OSR member are all up in arms about something that doesn't even exist: people playing new games calling their style crap. News Flash: The vast majority of gamers out there are not even aware of the OSR, and those that do I'd say the vast majority of them do not have an opinion.

Plus Edition Wars are the lowest form of Nerdrage. Better off arguing who would win in a fight, ninjas or Jedi.

Ærypt and Zakhara

Following up on my previous post on Desert Elves & Orcs, I thought I might detail the region they live in some more.

Ærypt is a pastiche of Arypt, Erypt, and Egypt with Gygax's Necropolis and Ravenloft's Har'Akir thrown in.

 
So Zakhara was detailed in the Al-Qadim boxed set and I am going to use that as much as possible. Ærypt is different. I mentioned that I want to use Gygax's Necropolis product as a basis. "Necropolis" is actually two products. The first was Gary's "The Necropolis - And the Land of Egypt" for the Mythus RPG. The second was "Gary Gygax's Necropolis" for d20. Both offer me something that my Ærypt needs; a springboard.

What if we took 3^rd or 4^th Dynasty Egypt, and then made it very evil and full of undead? We get Ærypt. I will also borrow from my other favorite setting, Ravenloft, and use the background for Har'Akir and its Darklord Anhktepot combined with the Masque of the Red Death background on Egypt and Imhotep. I never liked MotRD's treatment of Imhotep, but Anhktepot is fair game! I have some ideas here, but I also have an issue now. My Ærypt is sun-baked deserts and Zakhara is a land of sands, dunes, and trade routes by camels and oasis's. Looking at the Mystara Map, Arypt is a land of some savannas, scrub land, and jungles! That won't do at all.

So I was comparing these two maps. One is of Arypt of Mystara and the other is Erypt of Oerth. The shapes are similar and fit well with the "Lower Ærypt" on my map. What can account for the changes? Simple. Dark Sun. Or at least the ideas from Dark Sun. Combine those, knowing that my starting point is lush Pre-Dynastic Egypt and my ending is the sun, baked, undead infested lands like Har'Akir or Necropolis, I have my history. Plus the nice thing is I am using the Mystara timeline, but about 640 in the future.
Here we go:

Long Ago* the lands known as Ærypt and Zakhara were once a fertile plain. The inhabitants were few, but they made peaceful lives. To the far west Jungle Gnomes and Jungle Elves lived. Along the Eastern Coast lived tribes of Catmen, known as Rakastas. Till one day a great hole opened in the sky and down came gods (Humans really) they brought with them their slaves (orcs) and began to settle. While the peace of the land was broken, there was no outright warfare. The Gnomes went farther west to avoid contact, but elves were fascinated by the new gods. The Rakasta found much in common with these humans and were soon integrated into their society. Yet as the years grew on it was obvious that these gods were not the benevolent kind. To erect their giant pyramids they soon took elves as slaves as well, with the Rakasta as their cruel task masters. For years untold the elves suffered under the yoke of the humans and watch as their forests were plundered and cut down to build more and more temples, all for the glory of the Sorcerer Kings. But even this was not enough.

The latest Sorcerer King, Anhktepot craved more and more power. Eventually he came upon a ritual that would enable him to take magic from the very Earth herself. He drained the land to fuel his own urge for power. The there was a price. The land around him died and became a desert and he became a withered undead thing. The growth of this desert was horrifically fast. Within 100 years the lush green land was nothing but sands. Having enough of this the tribes of Elves and Orcs banded together and overthrew the Sorcerer King. Anhktepot was defeated and buried alive deep in his own pyramid in the dead city of Har'Akir.

The elves. Homeless began to travel the deserts in search for a new life, but unwilling to leave the lands of their birth.

Let the place simmer for 500 years and voilà. Instant new land with history and reasons to adventure. All that treasure that the locals won't touch. Danger, mystery, everything we game for.


Enjoy your Fourth of July weekend!

Mystoerth: Hyborea / Hyperborea

One of the common links on my Mystoerth world is Hyborea / Hyperborea. Both seem to be about the same thing, that is a pastiche of "the cold lands to the north". Given the roots of D&D in pulp fantasy it seems odd not to have one. With my world the question then is not so much of why to have it, but where to put it?

Mystara's Hyborea is on the continent of Brun far to the north in what would be the Arctic Circle, a rough analogy to Earth would Alaska. Oerth's Hyperborea is also firmly in the Arctic circle, some 30 degree south of the north pole, west of the Dramidj Ocean, north of the Sea of Hyerpborea. Not really an overlap, but close enough for me. On the Mystoerth Map, what would have been Oerth's Hyperborea is now the Empire of Alphatia and the Island of Dawn. So my solution is to go with the Mystara placement of it. Works and helps me fill in that area some.

Now what to do with it? Ah, that is the reason for the post.

Over at Jason Vey's The Wasted Land Blog he has been working on his Hyperborea. Now I respect Jason's opinion when it comes to Old School, anything remotely Conan or Howard related, so if he has something to say about it I listen. Plus he has really cool ideas. I'll import the White Orcs from Mystara to use in place of his orcs. I like the idea of Hyborean Halflings/ Hobbits. This might even help me solve the "problem" of hobbits vs. Halflings and why both hemispheres of my world are populated with the same sorts of creatures. The hobbits of my western world (Mystara) are the Tolkienesque hobbits that like to sit around, be fat and not really adventure. Hyborean hobbits are hardier and more prone to pick up a weapon. The Halflings of the eastern world (Oerth) are more adventure prone and are more like the Halflings of 3e/4e.

Adding Hyborea gives me license to add all sorts of other weirdness. And that is always good.

 

Generation HEX: Design Blog #2.5

So Generation HEX. Nice title huh? I like it.

I had this idea, and stop me if you have heard this one before, a school for children to learn magic. Sure, it has been done, a lot. Not just in games, but books (I seem to recall some books like this), TV shows (Charmed dealt with this for a bit) and other media. So why should I do it.

Simple. I wanted too.

I like the idea of a group of kids getting together and saving the world from destruction while dealing with the normal issues of growing up, school, social lives (or lack thereof) and interaction. To me it seems like a genre rich in potential and rich in storytelling. Part of my education was to go beyond the aforementioned books and even avoid really cool products like Green Ronin's "Hero High" which would cover some of the same ground. For this I went back to source. If you want to read the Bible and really get a feel for it, you read it in Latin or Greek. Freud or Jung, go back to the original German. For magical high schools, you got back to Magna and Anime. Yup, I took a crash course in Sailor Moon! I watched anime, in particular Shôjo anime, for ideas. I was surprised to see how close it all was to the kind of game I wanted to do.

I originally set it all up in a document was going to do an 80k word draft and talk to Guardians of Order about it. They (He really) seemed interested and then GoO disappeared. That tale is best told elsewhere by others. But Now I have all these ideas and all of these things I have written that need a new home and a new system. I also thought about using Unisystem (same as Buffy and Ghosts of Albion) and it would fit great, maybe too great. I can kinda do this game with Ghosts now and not really alter much and be too tempted not to alter the rest where it would be needed. Plus Unisystem is licensed and I don't have that sort of cash to do this on my own. I have been looking long and hard at True20 and really like what I see.

Why High School?

Simple, unlike college, or getting married, or having kids, High School is the last true universal everyone has and everyone shares. Getting on Facebook and seeing some old high school friends has got me thinking about these things again. It's odd really. I have contacted and been contacted by more High School friends than I have college friends. The time line is not that different. If you add Junior High to one and Grad School to the other, the span of time is about the same, and generally speaking I liked college life much more. But why is it that the High School friendship endure and more importantly whatever that thing is how do I capture it and emulate properly in my magical high school game?

I have some High School friends here. What do you all say?