Saturday, October 13, 2018

OSR Guide for the Perplexed Questionnaire

1. One article or blog entry that exemplifies the best of the Old School Renaissance for me:
James Maliszewski's Old School Dungeon Design Guidelines encapsulates the best principles of the OSR.

2. My favorite piece of OSR wisdom/advice/snark:
"A dungeon you explore once is not a dungeon."

3. Best OSR module/supplement:
This is a toss-up between what I want and what I know.
I want to say Hubris is the best OSR module because it exemplifies everything I want from a setting book in the best way possible.
But from experience I have to say Hot Springs Island. It's a thick read and it lacks quick statistics, but it is the best playground I've run for my players in a long time.

4. My favorite house rule (by someone else):
My friend Nathan has an old d6 that's chipped, making it a d7. He calls it his paradox die. Once per session a player could roll this paradox die. If they did and it landed on its seventh face some weird shit would happen next session. This has resulted in Spock and company beaming down right in front of our characters and parlaying with actual Cthulhu monsters.

5. How I found out about the OSR:
It was 2014 or 2015 and I was running 5E at my friend's comic book shop. A codger walked in with his wife. They were looking for a gift for his birthday. They saw us playing D&D and I invited them to come back next week and roll up a character. They came back and they brought a treasure trove of old school books with them. I was entranced and asked if the codger (the above-mentioned Nathan) would run a game for us. He obliged and I've been trapped ever since.

6. My favorite OSR online resource/toy:
I'm not sure if these count. But Discord and GIMP are my go to tools for running games these days.

7. Best place to talk to other OSR gamers:
The heaving throes of G+.

8. Other places I might be found hanging out talking games:
I'm on Discord. Feel free to friend me (Mcgee#3580).

9. My awesome, pithy OSR take nobody appreciates enough:
If you think OSR is a ruleset you have no idea what you're talking about.

10. My favorite non-OSR RPG:
It has a shit online presence but I still like playing 5E. Also I would like to give 13th Age a run.

11. Why I like OSR stuff:
It has character. It has avoided the soul sucking proboscises of big business.

12. Two other cool OSR things you should know about that I haven't named yet:
Library of Attnam is underrated and if you think I'm wrong you should read his posts about druids.
Remixes and Revelations is also underrated and he is the only glogger that gets it.

13. If I could read but one other RPG blog but my own it would be:
The easy answer is Jeff's Gameblog. 
But I would lock myself in a room with Fists of Cinder and Stone.

14. A game thing I made that I like quite a lot is:
Everyone likes the Time Wizard but it's shit.
I'm fond of my quick and dirty car rules.

15. I'm currently running/playing:
Right now I'm running Hot Springs Island as a part of a larger wavecrawl.

16. I don't care whether you use ascending or descending AC because:
I just want to kill you.

17. The OSRest picture I could post on short notice:
This picture of a medusa from LotFP because it was the first thing I saw when I opened the book and it convinced me the OSR was rad.

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