Gygax and Third-Level New PCs

Something that came up recently, as it does from time to time, was the claim that later in life Gygax started his players off at third level rather than first, specifically in the context of his own private OD&D games.

The implications of this vary, interestingly, as people read into it what they want.  That Gygax felt he had made a mistake back in the day and sought to correct it is the most common and most basic interpretation.  Some however take it further, using it as a cudgel against the school of thought arguing that such early-game lethality was the way D&D was meant to be played (as well as against the grimdark / misery-porn wing of the OSR that loves to focus on 1st-level PCs and their tendency to die to overly aggressive housecats).  If Gygax himself couldn't even be bothered to play out those levels, the argument goes, then how can anyone claim that this focus on low-level play and high lethality is anything approaching how things were "supposed to be"?

I'm not one that treats everything Gygax ever said or did as sacred canon; I suspect most people with their own OSR games have this attitude, since you have to be willing to tinker with canon to make such a game.  At the same time, I think you'd be foolish not to pay close attention to what the guy who literally (co)invented the game says, especially knowing that it comes backed with decades of play experience.  But beyond all this, what I found interesting is that no one was actually posting an original source, something that always sets off my historian alarms.

Pretty much every mention of this decision of Gary's goes back to the same page, a post on the Cyclopeatron blog from 2010.  That post in turn links to this (now archived) page from 2005 by Robert Fisher.  That in turn led to this Dragonsfoot thread, from the same author and also from 2005.  Unfortunately at that point the trail gets a bit colder, as it turns out that the information ultimately comes from somewhere in Gygax's 440-page ENWorld thread.  And for whatever reason, ENWorld does not allow you to download threads, even if you're a member.

Fortunately, some kind soul took the thread in its original 13-part form and upped it to the Internet Archive, enabling me to put all the PDFs together and search away.  And finally I found the post, from 2004.

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The "reports" referenced come from posts made by Gygax to the now-deleted Gygax Games Yahoo Group.  However, I have it archived, and the original post by Gygax on this was accurately copied to another forum.  It's pretty straightforward:

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So the original posts do confirm that Gary indeed was running new PCs at 3rd level.

At the same time, examining these posts, I think their ramifications may have been overstated.  He was running this particular starting group in 2004-2005 at third level.  However, there's no evidence that this was the result of a wider change of philosophy on Gary's part.  What context there is suggests the opposite: that he was generally following the traditional approach but giving these particular PCs a boost because

1. Previous PC actions had made the 1st level of Castle Greyhawk no longer a 1st-level PC environment (Gary ran a living dungeon, where the actions of different groups had wider ramifications), and
   
2. The rules as originally written assumed much larger party sizes (as I explored previously here)--Gary specifies eight PCs plus that many helper NPC bodies--while the actual party, as seen in the second post, is a mere five PCs.

In other words, rather than shifting in his old age to a more heroic or generous (however you prefer to term it) style of play, Gary was adjusting this particular campaign to this particular dungeon and group ("I made the group being 3rd level characters in hope that they would feel more confident in exploring lower levels").  He was a flexible enough DM to understand that the precise circumstances of the campaign called for a different approach: his player group was one-third the recommended size, and so he simply tripled their levels.  But somewhere along the line a game of Telephone began, and what seems to be a localized phenomenon became transmuted by the fanbase into something much more.

Focusing overmuch on this post misses this context, and even evolutions in Gygax's thinking.  For example, in a later post from October 2007, he said:

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Now "the usual" is using 2nd level as a start, not 3rd.

What is not clear is how universal these rules were.  The second post is again in the context of a con game.  As such, it's possible that rules such as these were Gygax's blanket tournament house rules (meaning used at all tournaments, but perhaps not ones used in campaign games).  He may have also used 3rd-level starts for tournaments and/or small-party games, and 2nd level for home games.  Unfortunately, beyond the idea that Gygax didn't treat the first-level start as sacrosanct, it's not clear.

I have to admit that I like the level adjustment in context, because my choice for my own game was to boost starting PCs to two hit dice and such, specifically because I was aiming for parties of 4-5 players and knew that old-school editions assumed much larger groups.  It's nice to see that Gygax reached a very similar conclusion for the same reason at the same party-size scale.

 ***

As an appendix to all this, the Dungeon Craft Youtube channel had an episode on the original blog posts that set most of this off (either the 2005 Robert Fisher original or, more likely since that blog has been gone since 2013 or so, the 2010 Cyclopeatron post, which is still live).  That post has a lot more game-running detail than just PCs beginning at third level: numerous other house rules make an appearance.  Dungeon Craft doesn't credit the original source because they don't seem to know it or to have gone looking for it, instead mentioning that they got it from a follower on Facebook who in turn copied it down from some unnamed forum and lost the original source.

It turns out that Gygax posted them on the Troll Lord forum in August 2007.

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It's interesting that, despite being a "hurried" post, it has options not listed in his much more well-known post on the same subject from two months later (the death adjustment and the move silently bonus for high Dex). These rules were used for GenCon 40.  Again, whether or not these rules were tournament rules or universal house rules is not clear from his post.  Regardless, the Dungeon Craft episode claims that these were Gygax's "SECRET rules for D&D".  In the comments however is a post from Luke Gygax:

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As Luke's post says it's "all bogus", one might be tempted to say that includes the third-level start.  But Luke only specifically references other changes, not the third-level start (and the original Troll Lord post doesn't mention level changes, only stat-based ones).

 

What is interesting here is that we have clear evidence (multiple posts) that Gygax did perform some of these changes, making it odd that Luke wasn't aware of them.  There are a few possibilities:

 

• the house rules may simply come from a point past which Luke was gaming with his father (we know Luke wasn't involved in at least one of the campaigns Gygax posted about above)
• Gygax didn't retroactively apply these rules to established games, so that older campaigns (such as the ones Luke may have been playing in with established characters) wouldn't see them in use, while new ones did, or
• again we may have a tourney game ruleset vs home game ruleset situation, so that only tourney players would see them while regular home players might be unaware they exist

In the end, I think the most important thing to understand is that Gygax's attitudes were not static.  They shifted while he was at TSR, and they shifted all over the place during the rest of his life.  No one post of his is going to encapsulate his one true secret opinion.

 

Simulacrum — Beta Release

EDIT: New drafts are uploaded in the first few days of the month (though sometimes I skip a month). A changelog for drafts is available at the bottom.

I've had a few requests to provide copies of my game, Simulacrum, and sometimes I've posted drafts in the comments section or to /osrg.   Overall though I've been reluctant to put it out in a main post.  In part that's because I wanted to continue to write about the process of development, and putting out a near-final release would seem to detract from charting its creation.  And I've not been in any hurry because this project has always been for myself, rather than based on any delusion that the world breathlessly awaits another OSR game.

But a lot of my reluctance has to do with wanting it to be the best that it can be before really releasing it to the wider world.  A year of playtesting saw my players hit 7th level, and I'm looking forward to their exploration of the game's higher levels and the inevitable tweaks that will produce.

Still, I think it's time.  So, without further ado, here's the beta for my humble game.  I'll be continuing to run my campaign, read blogs and other games, and take into account feedback, all of which will lead me to tweak things here and there, and eventually I'll put it up on DriveThru and make it "final", but it is tested and feature-complete and you should find it perfectly playable.

1 - Simulacrum Player's Manual - Beta 26-06

2 - Simulacrum GM's Manual - Beta 26-02

3 - Simulacrum Designer Notes - Beta 26-06

4 - Simulacrum Playing Aids - Beta 24-08

The Player's Manual is entirely self-contained, and should be everything a player needs.

The GM's Manual completes the game; it has some cross-referencing, in that it expands and comments on Player's Manual material, but is GM-only.

The Designer Notes are bonus material, made simply because I'm tired of downloading OSR games and having no idea what they did to depart from the TSR baseline, let alone why they did so.  Everything I've done has been for a reason, and I imagine at least a few of you reading a history/theory/game design blog are going to be interested in that kind of inside baseball, as I am.  By reading it, those on the fence can decide if a given change has a basis that makes sense for them.  Completely optional.

Lastly, the Playing Aids PDF consists of a few simple squares you can print and cut out to give to players so that they can announce their stances each round by throwing down their choice on the table, aiding the GM in running fights quicker.  They're not necessary at all: ever since I switched to Zoom I've been just handling that verbally, but in person I've found that it speeds things up.  The PDF also has a GM's sheet that I print off a copy of each session to track key session elements: time passing, treasure gained, and so on (the little dinosaurs in the time-tracking boxes are a reminder to make a wandering monster check).

The only thing that I feel is missing is a character sheet.  I created one for my own use, but it uses graphical elements I stole from other works and so wouldn't be right to share.  Characters are pretty simple, as they are in most OSR games, and so this shouldn't be a major hindrance.

Why Bother?

As I said above, most of this was about creating a game for myself: very few people play most OSR games.  What it does and why is thoroughly explored in the Design Notes document, and there's lots of changes.  However, in short, I do think this offers a few key things that other editions / clones don't:

A thorough design focus on 4-5 players.  As I've explored in other posts, old-school D&D assumes large parties: 6 PCs/NPCs at the very minimum, with 15-16 total towards the (extreme) top end.  Old-school lethality is definitely a thing, but a lot of it comes from your modern group of 4 to 5 players rolling up to keeps in the borderlands without any retainers and getting mobbed by hordes of monsters placed to challenge player groups that were two to three times the size.  Simulacrum takes a combination of PC toughening and monster weakening throughout the game framework that brings things back to a more even keel in terms of party / enemy balance.  PCs aren't superheroes, but neither are they hopeless frails in the face of the enemy.  This isn't intended to just make for stronger parties, but to level the playing field for smaller groups closer to where things used to be, albeit in a non-traditional fashion.

Native hexcrawl support.  Using the system I've worked out in an earlier post, the game handles hexcrawling in a far cleaner fashion than the traditional D&D rules, making the wilderness portion of the game not just something paid lip service to, while at the same time focusing on exploration rather than bogging things down with a mountain of tiresome Wilderness Survival Guide-type survivalist tedium.

Two modular core classes.  A tight two-page spread gives you all your core character creation, so that making new characters is quick and easy.  At the same time, a mix of modular add-ons and spell schools allows one to create a set of custom classes for their own campaign, or to have an extremely flexible structure that allows you to more readily capture a wider variety of archetypes and variations than normal, while at the same time not needing page after page of classes and subclasses or descending into the hell of "builds".  As such, you get brief rules and fast character creation, but also a decent amount of flexibility that should let you make a form of any standard D&D class as well as a few that never existed.

Streamlining without compromising core play.  I've tried to make things run more smoothly in terms of aspects of weapons, armour, saves, task resolution, classes (as above), and spells.  However, I tried to avoid the common phenomena of streamlining for its own sake, and to the point of removing what makes an OSR game actually OSR.  Things like encumbrance and the classic dungeoneering procedures are kept and even sometimes slightly clarified / expanded upon, and advice on how to use the engine in old-school games sown throughout, so that the game doesn't become a generic fantasy ruleset but remains focused on the classic dungeoncrawl and compatible with most any old-school module.  "Rules-light" is not an end unto itself, and my general approach has been "how I can make something work better for me" rather than "what can I cut".

(Reasonably) complete rules.  Many OSR games aim to be rules-light, but achieve that in large part by farming out core content to books belonging to other games: spell lists, magic items, bestiaries, any procedures other than core task resolution.  I've attempted to include everything you need for typical play.  While it's always worth reading the 1st edition DMG, you don't need to consult it or the PHB to actually run a typical game here.

I would welcome any questions or comments.  I'd only note first that between the GM's Manual and the Designer Notes that a lot of the "why" as to what I did is covered.  Still, if I missed something or are not clear there, by all means let me know.

For those interested in a draft-by-draft changelog, I've started a simple text one here, tracking from Oct 2022 onwards:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eu1RLu1nJdo80Uv-RODLmOkKp4kOU_6Q/view?usp=share_link

I hope this all is of some use to you out there, either as a full game or as a collection of elements for you to steal for your own OSR game, as is right and proper.  For those of you who commented on earlier drafts or run playtest games, thanks for your feedback over the years: it's been invaluable, and I'd be glad to hear more of it.  Happy adventuring.  Go forth and plunder!

A Historical Look at the OSR — Part IV

Back of a TSR t-shirt advertising the upcoming third edition.

While TSR moved away from its original vision for Dungeons & Dragons (as explored in parts I, II, and III), not everyone moved along with it.  A minority[1] refused—whether due to their love of that older style of play and/or dislike of what replaced it, or simply their reactionary natures—to adopt the new style.  They merrily continued along year after year with their dungeoneering and sandbox play, even as 2nd edition took over and the very concept of the dungeoncrawl became an oddity in D&D, still using those "rules you never used anyway".  These people became the old-school playerbase.

The release of 3rd edition D&D in August 2000, then, only altered the form of older players' scorn.  Old-school players soon began defining themselves in contrast to both the 2nd and 3rd editions: by 2002, to the existing list of perceived advantages old-school D&D had over newer forms had been added the concept of "rules-light" design, an idea that many newcomers to the OSR are baffled by and many looking for cheap gotchas point out as an absurdity: how can one ever look at 1st edition AD&D, they ask, and claim that the old-school is rules-light?  The answer is clear in the context of the time that the phrase first came into use: old-school rulesets were being contrasted against 3rd edition's avalanche of books and accompanying tidal wave of spells, items, feats, prestige classes and such, and the mammoth statblocks of its NPCs and monsters.  In this light, old-school rulesets, while less unified and sometimes more unwieldy, were obviously far simpler than 3rd edition.[2]

A modest example of dungeonpunk.

Old-school fans had by this point rejected the idea of Whiggish, progressive advancement that many gamers took (and still take) for granted: the idea that each edition was an improvement on the one prior to it, everything moving along a path steadily upward, twirling, twirling, twirling towards a superior ruleset.  While one of the marketing campaigns 3rd edition launched with was "back to the dungeon", its concept of the dungeoncrawl was rooted in superheroic play, a greater contempt for resource management than ever before, and an aesthetic that became derided as "dungeonpunk": moving away from the cliches of fabulous but entirely useless chainmail bikinis and such and moving to what rapidly became a new set of cliches based on fabulous but entirely useless straps, pouches, and belts everywhere (and then for 2008's 4th edition and 2009's Pathfinder to a different, World of Warcraft-based artstyle with an emphasis on exaggerated armour pieces that became derisively known as "pauldroncore").[3]

A similarly modest example of pauldroncore.

Third edition, however, introduced a key element that would make the OSR possible.  Wizard of the Coast's Ryan Dancey successfully pushed to allow third-party publishers to create new content for or related to D&D by means of a perpetual, free open gaming license (OGL).  The company followed this new license with a System Resources Document (SRD) that anyone could draw upon, containing much of what would broadly be considered D&D's intellectual and creative framework: its foundational stats, classes, spells, monsters, and terminology.  The fundamental idea was, in a nutshell, that the popularity of D&D was now its greatest asset, and the best way to keep it on top of the RPG world was to make it easier to play than ever before, to spread it to every corner so that the RPG ecosystem was all D&D (or OGL derivatives) all the time.  For a social game, playerbase was everything; that one could make a "better" game (whatever that meant) was irrelevant in the face of the fact that everyone knew how to play D&D and owned the books and was comfortable with what they knew.  WotC's innovations would help ensure that this phenomenon continued.

Bold concepts by themselves, the OGL and SRD (both released in 2000) would open to the public many of the elements that the notoriously litigious TSR had guarded so fiercely with numerous threatened lawsuits against fans and publishers alike.[4]  Now Wizards was offering to just give it away.  As Dancey explained in 2000,

The idea is to abstract the "game" inside Dungeons & Dragons and reduce it to a genre-neutral set of concepts and rules.  Then, we'll layer on a thick helping of D&D-type fantasy elements, like the standard D&D classes, races, spells, and monsters.  In the future, we might layer on a science fiction layer, or a horror layer, or any other genre we think would be interesting.  In fact, Jon[athan] Tweet feels that a very strong "rules light" version of D&D could easily be constructed from the existing manuscript; being completely compatible with but just smaller in scope and application than the full blown 3rd Edition D&D rules.

Jonathan Tweet was precisely right, but not in the way he envisioned.

Early Rumbles

Unfortunately, a great deal of material has disappeared down the internet memory hole.  One of the early hangouts for old-school fans was The Delver's Dungeon, where a decent amount of original OSRIC discussion was had, while the Swords & Wizardry and original Labyrinth Lord forums contained a lot of early information on those games: all gone now.  Google+ went too, even taking comments on non-G+ blogs made through its service (I lost a lot of early comments on this blog due to this ever so helpful Google solution).  Nonetheless, we can still piece together a decent amount of the immediate prehistory of what would soon become known as the Old-School Renaissance.[5]

In the early 2000s, several proto-OSR publishers appeared.  The first was Necromancer Games, founded in 2000.  They produced products for the new 3rd edition that aimed to capture the spirit of 1st edition: "Third Edition Rules, First Edition Feel" was their slogan, and they soon had a thriving forum with like-minded individuals (preserved here).  As co-founder Clark Petersen said in a 2000 interview:

First Edition is the cover of the old DMG (Dungeon Masters Guide) with the City of Brass; it is Judges Guild; it is Type IV demons not Tanaari and Baatezu; it is the Vault of the Drow not Drizzt Do'urden; it is the Tomb of Horrors not the Ruins of Myth Drannor; it is orcs not ogrillons; it is mind flayers not Ilithids (or however they spell it); it is Tolkien, Moorcock, Howard and Leiber, not Eddings, Hickman, Jordan and Salvatore; it is definitely Orcus and the demon-princes and not the Blood War; it is Mordenkainen's Faithful Hound not Elminster's Evasion; and it is Artifacts and Relics from the old DMG (with all the cool descriptions).

I always say we want to be the VW Bug of roleplaying companies, meaning that we want to have a modern style and appeal but an obvious link to the past.  One of the ways we do that is how we design the modules.  For example, we use full color covers (not that funky mono-color of the old modules).  But our modules have the same basic format of the old modules—inset art, module number in the upper left corner, diagonal band in the upper left corner, logo placement, etc.  I guarantee you, when you look at one of our modules you will flash back to the old ones—just like when you see a new VW bug.  And hopefully you will say "Man, that is just like an old module except cooler."

Necromancer would team up with Gary Gygax as well as TSR alumnus Rob Kuntz to release works by them with solid old-school credentials (although the company would not be able to keep either author long-term), and later some Judges Guild licensed products.  (Goodman Games would follow with their line of Dungeon Crawl Classics modules based on similar principles, initially created for 3rd edition rather than their own game—not released until 2012—beginning in 2003 with DCC #1, Idylls of the Rat King.)

 

The second was Kenzer & Company, which released Hackmaster in May 2001.  This pseudo-parody game, based on an absurdist take of old-school D&D as filtered through the medium of the popular Knights of the Dinner Table comics, took every caricature of classic D&D and dialed it to 11.  Taking advantage of a unique legal loophole,[6] they were able to use the AD&D 1st and 2nd edition rules as a baseline for their work.

The original "Collector's Edition".

The third, close on its heels, was Troll Lord Games.  Founded in 2000, in June 2001 the company announced that Gary Gygax would be writing books for them.  These were aimed at the 3rd-edition market, but of course carried strong old-school credentials.  They followed this up with an adventure by TSR alumni Rob Kuntz, and later further Gygax works related to the legendary, never-released Castle Greyhawk.[7]  They also released their own game system, Castles & Crusades, in 2004.  While not expressly old-school in terms of rules, it aimed to create a modern take on the concept, and generated a great deal of excitement amongst old-school players in the lead-up to its release.  However, while it developed a decent-sized fanbase, numerous grumbles were heard over its modern mechanics and resulting deviations from old-school play, which turned off many of the key players that would go on to launch the OSR proper (disappointment with C&C was one of the impetuses behind the creation of OSRIC).[8]  C&C is widely credited as a sort of old-school gateway drug, luring many newer players to the old-school fold, but though still supported it has largely been eclipsed today in old-school circles by other games.[9]

Beginnings

 

The major hangouts for the old-school community in the third edition era were all forum-based.  The biggest by far was Dragonsfoot ("The home of TSR-era D&D"), its public website going live in May 2000, only three months prior to the release of 3rd edition.  Arguments on Dragonsfoot and the Grognard's Tavern over which editions should be discussed and how led to an exodus to the new Knights & Knaves Alehouse (K&K) forum in mid-2005; the new forum cut 2nd edition as well as B/X and BECMI from its list of approved editions, its members frequently deriding the latter two as "kiddie D&D" ("This board unashamedly and proudly supports Old School GYGAXIAN games.  Specifically: Original Dungeons & Dragons – the little books, First Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, and Judges Guild products for OD&D & AD&D.  This board is for the discussion of OLD SCHOOL style games and gaming.  We make no excuses and no apologies for other game systems not being supported here.")  And June 2007 saw the creation of ODD74, a forum dedicated to the 1974 original release and immediate offshoots.  There were smaller forum communities, such as Grognard's Tavern (archive link), Delver's Dungeon, the Doomsday Message Boards, Old School University, Pied Piper Publishing's forum (which had a decent amount of participation from former TSR employee Rob Kuntz; a lot of material formerly there was lost in a board crash) and the occasional discussion on EN World and the not-yet hopeless RPGNet forums, and also a limited amount on Usenet (mostly rec.games.frp.dnd), now vanished Yahoo Groups such as Gygax Games, and even Livejournal (where a proto-version of Grognardia could be found).  But K&K and Dragonsfoot were the key places at the time, and these old-school D&D forums would be the centre of the birth of the OSR.

 

An important additional bit of context is that by this point all old-school books had been out of print for many years—in some case decades—and no legal PDFs were available.  Beyond the obvious fact that no significant support for old-school gaming was appearing,[10] it was increasingly difficult even to find the base rules, especially if you were a fan of 1974's OD&D.  There was a strong pent-up desire for support of all kinds amongst the old-school community that was not being met.  Dragonsfoot had been releasing free PDF-only products of all-new material support for old editions of D&D since 2000, without using the OGL, but this was not meeting the perceived need for wider visibility and distribution, or the creation of print product.  At the same time, fear of legal retribution by TSR's successor, Wizards of the Coast, prevented more ambitious approaches.[11] 

 

Discussion along the lines of what Dancey and Tweet were considering—on using the OGL to create something akin to a TSR-era edition of a game with the serial numbers filed off—had occurred on Dragonsfoot as early as 2003, but there was little hope at the time that it would amount to anything.

BFRPG (Basic Fantasy RPG), the first OSR game, was announced and released by Chris Gonnerman in a very incomplete form on the Dragonsfoot forums on 20 January 2006.  BFRPG was a new type of game, in that it was an unabashedly old type of game.  Built from the OGL, it was not merely inspired by older editions (as Castles & Crusades was) but specifically attempted to recreate the 1981 B/X edition of D&D.  It was not 100% faithful to B/X: it separated race and class, used ascending AC, did not use gold for XP, and made numerous other changes, but there was no doubt overall as to what it sought to do, something made very clear by its creator (insofar as was possible: the OGL forbids any use of or direct comparison to Dungeons & Dragons or other elements of what it terms Wizards of the Coast "Product Identity", either in your work or as advertising, which is why OSR games are always so vaguely advertised as being "compatible with X edition of the world's most popular fantasy game" and the like; fear of litigation made designers even more vague and handwavy in these early days).  While unfinished when first released, BFRPG was rapidly iterated to the point that it could be run, with updates coming as much as daily early on, and received steady official support and soon a healthy forum of its own.

Cover of OSRIC v0.03

OSRIC (Old School Reference and Index Compilation) was announced by Stuart Marshall on Dragonsfoot on 7 June 2006, with a PDF available by the end of the month.  I'm going to spend a lot of time on OSRIC, because its story is more complex than that of the other first-wave OSR games, and because today I see many people asking what is the point of it and other similarly close-but-not-quite "retroclones" (as they came to be known) of various D&D editions, and why did they not go that last mile and just make it a full clone (as Old-School Essentials eventually did with B/X, to great success).

The game which would become OSRIC was begun in late 2004, by Matthew Finch, a retired lawyer.  He wrote an initial 76,000-word draft before handing off the project to Stuart Marshall, who would become the project's main editor and driver and see it through to completion.

I don't credit myself with the success of OSRIC, only for recognizing the legal framework that allowed a true retro-clone.  The success of OSRIC was due to Stuart Marshall.  I did a lot of the art (all of it in the first release, which has thankfully been leavened with more skillful work from others in the later versions), and obviously my original draft comprised the majority of the text, but basically I was out of the loop before OSRIC’s release.

—Matthew Finch, 2011

OSRIC was unique for several reasons.  Most notably, it aimed to be a near-perfect restatement of a previous D&D edition—specifically 1st edition AD&D—something no third-party game had ever before attempted.[12]  That having been said, it had two important boundaries.  The first was that it was envisioned as a publishing vehicle, not a complete game.

The idea there is that the publishers will be able to say that their document is "compatible with OSRIC."  (Anyone can do this, without asking permission from me, and there's no need for a fee or royalty to me of any kind.)  I hope that the buying public will understand that this means your publication is compatible with other systems as well, if you follow that...  I realise this is vague but I'm under the constraints [regarding referencing Product Identity] I indicated earlier.

Secondly, it's an openly-usable label for your publication.  In other words, if you say you're selling something compatible with OSRIC, you'll benefit from the marketing that other people have put into their own OSRIC-compatible stuff, while they will also benefit from your own efforts.

I should say that I don't expect anyone actually to play OSRIC.

—Stuart Marshall, 2006

OSRIC was intended to allow people to make new supporting material for 1st edition from a legally sound basis, rather than to be played on its own: it was only a game insofar as it facilitated the release of content for the game it was emulating, and so was deliberately missing key material in its text: monsters, magic items, and treasure, in particular.  But enough was there that a designer could make a new adventure or other supplement, slap a "compatible with OSRIC" label on the front, and could rest easy knowing that by not directly referencing D&D and by using material that OSRIC had vetted as being okay to use, they were legally shielded, while anyone could look at that label and know that what they were truly getting was, at long last, new 1st edition AD&D product.  It is difficult to overemphasize the fear that people had in those days about attempting to employ the OGL for such a purpose: this is obviously not what it had been intended for, and the very recent and very rich history of TSR attacking others perceived to have infringed on their IP was in the back of everyone's minds.  OSRIC helped put that to rest; without it, many other games along these lines would likely never have existed.

The second important boundary was that, being the first of its kind and given the issues noted directly above, it was extremely cautious about infringement.  While BFRPG was shielded by being a more direct employment of the OGL and by adding in enough major variations of its own to make it legally distinct, OSRIC sought to be as close as it dared to 1st edition, and therefore was a riskier venture.  Breaking new ground as they were, Finch and Marshall felt that certain deviations were necessary to give them a better legal footing, to enable them to safely state that this was not a copy or legal derivation of 1st edition.

The first element is the reasoning that lay behind such things as the elimination of the weapon type vs AC table (unnecessary in a reference ruleset solely intended to allow third parties to make 1st-edition-compatible adventures), while the second element explains things like OSRIC's experience point tables being subtly different.

[The first draft of OSRIC] was done with legal considerations in mind all the way through, and there were lots of decisions and judgment calls.  Being a lawyer, I'm pretty comfortable with those judgment calls as they were made for OSRIC, but each [other such] game would require the same step by step process.  It's not going to be clear to a non-lawyer why I made certain decisions or even where the decisions were made - except in the various areas where there's something major, like the randomization of the base xp required to gain level (which, since OSRIC is designed for supplement creation, would be utterly invisible to users of 1e supplements).

—Matthew Finch, 2007

The release of the OGL is what made OSRIC possible, but it also helped that a) OSRIC had been initially developed by a former lawyer and brought to solicitors for consultation and b) the final developer and person in charge of its release, Stuart Marshall, was based in Britain, an entirely different legal jurisdiction.  He did speak with Wizards of the Coast concerning the project, but while they were unable to come to a firm agreement, Marshall felt he had the grounds to release regardless.

OSRIC's legality is between myself and WOTC, and I have discussed it with their representatives.  I don't intend to provide any further information on our discussions on a public messageboard, except to say that those discussions ground to a halt over a year ago now and OSRIC remains available.

—Stuart Marshall, 2007

The narcissism of small differences and a fundamental misunderstanding of the legal basis that Finch and Marshall felt compelled to operate under ensured that OSRIC would be castigated by some for its deviations from 1st edition core, but overall it was a clear success.  Its popularity was such that Marshall was eventually persuaded to "finish" it: OSRIC v2.0 was a complete rules system, 402 pages to the original's 132 pages.  With the assistance of an enlarged editorial crew, it was released in November 2008.  Now one could play OSRIC instead of 1st edition if they so desired.  But the increasing popularity of the simpler B/X and games derived from it, plus OSRIC's lack of direct (as opposed to third-party) product support and its more conservative licensing rules, has kept it largely as the publishing vehicle it was originally intended to be.

Click to enlarge.

With OSRIC having blazed the initial trail, the release of the next major OSR game, Labyrinth Lord, was fairly straightforward.  Daniel Proctor announced the impending release on Dragonsfoot in May 2007, and the game appeared in August of that year.  It was a full game, like BFRPG, and based on B/X, like BFRPG, but Proctor did not see the two as rivals:

[I want to] discourage the thinking that Labyrinth Lord is in competition with BFRPG.  I'd rather that people not think of it in terms of what Labyrinth Lord can offer that other games cannot.  ...  The goal of LL is not to replace any game, but to be a reference document for players and publishers to produce compatible material for a classic fantasy game we all know and enjoy.  This is same goal as OSRIC.

BFRPG is a great piece of work.  It represents very different goals than what I am trying to do with Labyrinth Lord....

—Daniel Proctor, 2007

Though greater fidelity was a goal, Labyrinth Lord still had a similar series of subtle deviations from core B/X, intended to help legally shield it, following the methodology OSRIC had pioneered.  It was a great success, and Proctor successfully pushed to see that it was available in game stores as well.  Together with BFRPG it was key in making B/X—a ruleset only in existence for two years—the dominant old-school edition in the modern community.  While the lack of long-term direct support from Proctor's Goblinoid Games helped Old-School Essentials take the top spot in old-school emulation, that Labyrinth Lord proved to be legally and commercially viable allowed OSE to be as bold a direct reinstatement as it is, and overall (like OSRIC) the importance of Labyrinth Lord cannot be overstated.

Rounding out the big four of the initial OSR games was Swords & Wizardry (S&W).  Announced on Dragonsfoot and a now-defunct blog in June 2008, S&W aimed at broad 1974 OD&D emulation (with some additional material from Supplement I: Greyhawk).  However, as creator Matthew Finch explained, it wasn't attempting 100% possible (i.e. legally allowable) fidelity; a prime example was its innovative single saving throw and its use of both ascending and descending AC.  His design goals wandered somewhat during its creation, but he was aiming for what he called a "Rosetta Stone effect", so that he could both have a (mostly) OD&D clone while at the same time achieving compatibility with and linking together, as he put it, "Labyrinth Lord, OSRIC, 1e, Holmes Basic, Moldvay Basic, and a couple of other games that use ascending AC but which I can't name without permission."

S&W as a whole rapidly spiralled into a series of sub-versions designed to represent different versions of OD&D and give its players the creative freedom it was created to foster: 1974 plus Greyhawk (the original release, which became known as S&W Core), pure 1974/LBB (White Box), 1974 plus all the original supplements (Complete), stripped down (Light: 4 pages), and almost but not quite as stripped down (Continual Light: 17 pages).  Finch teamed up with Frog God Games (a successor to Necromancer Games) to handle S&W in 2010, and support for the game now largely comes from that company.

Click to enlarge.

In addition to the normal reasons for creating a retro clone (organized/beginner-accessible rules, shared brand name, preservation of rules in free format), Swords & Wizardry is a project to re-initiate the "hobbyist" approach to OOP gaming, the idea that you can tinker from the ground up and make the rules fit any sort of fantasy you want.  Too many gamers (and this is not limited to modern gamers, I have seen it on OOP sites as well) approach games like consumers.  If it's not in the rules, it's not in the game; if it doesn't fit into the rules, it's not in the game; if the rules aren't completely specific, they're bad rules - you see what I mean by this mindset.  But games used to be approached with the ASSUMPTION that the GM and players were going to hack them apart and make them fit the desired effect.  The same way we'd take rules for Napoleonic wargaming and tweak them into rules for Space Marines or 52mm green plastic army men.

—Matthew Finch, 2008

From this point the retroclone explosion began, with dozens of different variations on the same OD&D, Holmes, B/X, BECMI, or AD&D theme appearing in short order.[13]  The vast majority of these Noun Ampersand Noun games came and went without ever being noticed, as readers found themselves with more games than they could ever hope to keep up with, let alone play, and most designers happy with being able to put their house rules into a published state but lacking the ability to articulate a reason as to why they were good changes to make and then get that information out to the potential gamer (in many ways further examples of Ron Edward's fantasy heartbreaker phenomenon).  But for those seeking variety and actual support for old-school playstyles, this era was paradise after the long drought of the 2nd and 3rd editions.

Though my focus here has been on systems, the OSR was not just about rulesets.  Indeed, the original goal of the OSR was to provide vehicles allowing support (modules, etc) for old-school D&D, not to create systems to compete with it.  That having been said, these new rulesets were clearly the spark for the wider explosion.  Once the clones were launched, dozens of new adventure modules were released for them and, thanks to the largely unified base vision in the burgeoning OSR in this period, they were almost all broadly cross-compatible with each other and old-school D&D with minimal conversion.  While many of them were terrible, Sturgeon's Law said that was to be expected: the point was that at long last there was support once more.

In a final post, I'll examine the OSR's mutation, fragmentation, and transition to its modern state.

---

 

[1] Per Ryan Dancey's famous assessment of the death of TSR, the company performed no real market research, in contrast to, for example, the immense efforts of Strategy & Tactics magazine to understand their customer base.  As such, while it's obvious that old-school players eventually became a minority amongst the D&D playerbase, we don't know (and will probably never know) precisely when this occurred.  In particular, it would be fascinating to know if in the 1980s it was a case of old-school players abandoning D&D or D&D abandoning them.

[2] The idea that D&D was meant to be light on rules (or at least, lighter in that fashion than 3rd edition and later) was no modern rose-coloured-glasses reinterpretation of how things were done in the 1970s (a charge often levelled at various elements of the OSR, or the movement as a whole).  As the afterword to the original 1974 OD&D booklets reads, "we urge you to refrain from writing for rule interpretations or the like unless you are absolutely at a loss, for everything herein is fantastic, and the best way is to decide how you would like it to be, and then make it just that way!"  Similarly, Tim Kask wrote in the foreword to 1976's Eldritch Wizardry that “D&D was meant to be a free-wheeling game, only loosely bound by the parameters of the rules.”  As the rules of modern D&D became increasingly codified, old-school gamers embraced this philosophy with a vengeance.  At the same time, "rules-light" applied as a universal, contextless OSR principle would cause a lot of confusion and play a major part in helping the movement lose its way.  See Part V for details.

[3] For a brief look at the art direction philosophy at the birth of 3rd edition, see a note from the WoTC art director in Dragon #275, p. 4.

 

[4] In the 90s TSR was often either written T$R or said to stand for "They Sue Regularly".

 

[5] The earliest use of this phrase I can locate is a casual bit of speculation by an anonymous poster on the future of the old-school in the Castles & Crusades subforum of Dragonsfoot (since rolled into a collective "Simulacrum" subforum), in June 2005.  It popped up again in July 2006 on Dragonsfoot, used by long-time poster T Foster.  It was in common usage by 2008 to refer to the wider boom in old-school materials and play (see for example the influential Fight On! magazine, the first issue of which was released in June 2008 and which billed itself as "A Fanzine for the Old-School Renaissance").

 

[6] As the story goes, when TSR put out their 1999 Dragon Magazine Archive, Wizards of the Coast supposedly failed to get permission to reprint the Knights of the Dinner Table comic, which had appeared there.  A contract dispute was settled out of court, a part of which involved Wizards and Kenzer reaching an agreement about creating a derivative work, and that led to HackMaster.

 

[7] No, WG7 does not count.

 

[8] See this blog post by Akratic Wizardry, or this later post by T. Foster.

 

[9] I'd be remiss if I also didn't mention Mazes & Minotaurs.  Released in 2006, it's one part game and one part thought experiment, positing a world where the very first RPG was based on Ancient Greek myth rather than D&D's Western medieval basis.  Pretending to have been first released in 1972, in many ways it is patterned on OD&D, including a Greyhawk-style first supplement, and some call it the first retroclone.  All reviews I've ever seen have been eminently favourable.  You can get the 2017 updated edition of the game completely free from DriveThru or the publisher's website.

 

[10] Rob Kuntz released a pair of old-school modules that year, though the first (Dark Druids) was not statted for AD&D specifically, presumably for the standard copyright reasons.  August of 2006 would also see Goodman Games release a 1st-edition version of DCC 12.5, The Iron Crypt of the Heretics, at GenCon, a conversion of a 3rd edition module under the OGL.  As such, it's possible to say that an eventual burst of large-scale 1st edition and other old-school support may have occurred even without the appearance of the retroclones, but the clear avalanche of support--especially commercial support--that appears from late 2006 onward makes it difficult to argue that retroclones weren't the key impetus.

[11] Thanks to T. Foster for adding this information in the comments below, which I then edited in.  At the same time, as this study is primarily concerned about what people would call the OSR rather than the "wilderness years" of the old-school prior to that, I'm leaving out a great deal of information on old-schoolers in the pre-OSR period.  A heavily neglected area, it probably deserves a write-up of its own.

 

[12] The idea in general for OSRIC was fidelity, which meant no house rules.  However, some items were left out because Gygax later said they were a bad idea and the fanbase generally agreed (this also made further differences in the ruleset, further protecting OSRIC's creators), while initiative specifically was a homebrewed modification--albeit with a solid foundation in 1st edition--simply because it is literally impossible (literally literally, not figuratively literally) to run 1st edition initiative 100% by the book.

 

[13] The Taxidermic Owlbear list contains many 3rd and 4th-edition games, but gives a strong taste of how enormous the explosion was (and continues to be).

In Memoriam — Martin McKenna

From "Revenge of the Vampire"

 

A few years ago people were chatting on the Hero Games forums about how the system lacks a really short and user-friendly guide to applying it to the fantasy genre.  The idea of tackling this as a personal project immediately grabbed me, and I quickly banged out a 28-page intro called the Fantasy Hero Primer.  But while it was purely a fan work, intended to be free, I didn't want to just throw it out there without art.  Casting about, I found some nice images online from that classic British CYOA-type series, Fighting Fantasy.  Rather than the cartoonish weird of early D&D or heroic realism of the game's 1980s period, the artists of Fighting Fantasy—Bob Harvey, Russ Nicholson, Ian Miller, Dave Carson, Alan Langford, etc—and their British Gothic style were absolutely formative to me in shaping what I thought "proper" fantasy art should look like, and none more so than Martin McKenna.

 

From "Daggers of Darkness"

McKenna secured his first paid illustration work when he was just 16, with Games Workshop.  Of breaking into the industry, he recalled:  

“It was probably more like a lot of little breaks.  Really early stuff like meeting Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone in ‘86 was helpful.  They liked the fanzine work which had included a Fighting Fantasy spoof, and they recommended a submission to Warlock magazine.  Coincidentally Marc Gascoigne had seen my fanzine stuff and liked it, and he was then editor of Warlock.  Most importantly, an invitation came from John Blanche, then art director at Games Workshop, to produce work for him.  John’s initial contact came as a result of me entering an art competition featured in the Citadel Journal.  Instead of the hoped-for prize of a two quid postal order, I got a letter from John expressing interest in my stuff.  This led to my very first paying commission: illustrations for an Out of the Pit article in Warlock. So a bunch of things came together in the very beginning."

He provided a steady flow of work to GW in its early years, working on early 40K and WHFRP releases like Death on the Reik.  On the recommendation of Blanche, McKenna sent some samples to the editor at Puffin Books, and to his surprise this resulted in him being assigned an entire Fighting Fantasy title.  Daggers of Darkness was an early work and it shows: he told me, "I was 17 when I did that first book, still at school and doing it in my spare time.  I was very unsure of myself and it looks like I was emulating the style of John Blanche.  When Puffin amazed me by asking me to do another book I found much more confidence."

 

From "Howl of the Werewolf"

 

 

His style improved by leaps and bounds, and soon he was producing some phenomenal work, being regularly called in on some of the darker and more gothic titles in the FF line, like Revenge of the Vampire, Howl of the Werewolf, and Night of the Necromancer.  He wasn't just good: he had a fantastic imagination.  McKenna said that he had "pretty much a free hand on the look of the artwork, as long as it followed the important details in the brief."  Even his filler pieces—those small art bits the FF editors used to fill out page space during layout—were lively and full of character.

 

 

 

 

                     

 

He was asked to avoid anything too horrific in his FF pieces, but his ideas on what that meant vs those in charge sometimes differed: for Revenge of the Vampire a Puffin editor edited out some rivulets of blood he had running across a female vampire's cleavage.  It was a series intended for the young, after all.

 

 

From "Revenge of the Vampire"

 

To return to where I started, I emailed McKenna with some trepidation, asking how much he would charge for the use of some of his old FF artwork in this primer I was making.  He was extremely welcoming, allowing me to use it for free as long as there was no profit involved.  A few years later, when I started to put together my homebrew Simulacrum, I asked him again to buy some older FF pieces, with the idea that this time I would eventually be selling it, even if I anticipated a vast audience of several dozen.  He charged practically nothing and was nicely complimentary when I showed him early drafts.  The two books will be full of his art, and I only wish I had the opportunity to acquire more to show off; I had hoped to commission an original cover from him.  In September 2020, Martin McKenna committed suicide.

There's a page where you can buy prints of his art, with the proceeds going to his family.  It also serves as a nice overview of his work.

https://www.artpal.com/martinmckenna