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The Next Big Thing in OSR?

I just noticed yesterday that there seems to be a pattern of certain trends or even fads among OSR writers and commenters over the years. OSR as it exists today is usually considered to have started with OSRIC in 2006, but really appeared to be a thing that gets discussed on the internet around 2008 or so. Look at any of the oldest websites that are still around and almost none of them is older than that.

And as far as I am able to tell, there have been four main periods so far: Retroclones, Megadungeons, Sandboxes, and Weird Fantasy. Though I am getting the feeling that Weird Fantasy might already be on its final legs. But I am wondering what the next big thing that gets everyone excited might be. I think one good candidate might be Campaign Settings. The most highly praised releases of the last couple of months seem to be Yoon-Suin and A Red and Pleasant Land. Wouldn’t be surprised if we’re going to see more people hopping up on that train, though it might not be lending itself to discussing the theories behind it as much as the previous trends.

A Roleplaying Game of Mars

I wasn’t expecting that. There’s going to be a John Carter RPG to be released by Modiphius at the end of the year.

While a bit crude and dusty by now, given that they are almost a hundred years old, Edgar Burroughs space fantasy novels set on Mars had a huge impact on fantasy and science-fiction that surely equals Conan and The Lord of the Rings, even though few people still know about. It’s the primary source that inspired Star Wars to the point that you may call the first movie a rippoff, and it will be instantly familiar to any fan of the Dungeons & Dragons setting Dark Sun. There was a movie a few years back with the unfortunate name “John Carter”, which I think was pretty decent, but got not a lot of notice, and which I am assuming is the reason why this game is named the way it is. Even though I personally wouldn’t have any interest to run a campaign in which said character appears. There is so much more to the world than this one guy, who isn’t a particularly great character either.

Sadly, it’s a 2d20 system game like the new Conan game. It would need a lot of good press to make me want to spend any money on that.

Things that really piss me off: History Documentaries

I love watching history documentaries. There are lots of decent ones and even a couple really good ones.

But why do they all have such stupid names? For every single documentary that has the words secret, truth, lost, hidden or forbidden in the title, someone somewhere needs to be whacked in the head with a stone slab!

That is conspiracy theory crap! Don’t try to make your science more appealing by begging for attention by the dumbest of people.

Oh wow! I have readers!

Hey, I reached 50 comments on my posts. The visitor stats I have seem highly doubious and I think most of them are bots. But comments are actual readers who even have a strong enough oppinion about the stuff I write to make a reply to it. That gives me confidence that there’s a sizeable number of people reading this.

Though I wonder how they all get here? I don’t think there are a lot of links to this site other than various of my forum signatures.

(Oh, look! There’s a “Don’t track bots” option. I expect the visitor numbers to mostly evaporate now.)

Cypher System Rulebook this summer

I’ve been looking at the Numenera RPG this week and while I wouldn’t say I am a fan of it and don’t plan to run a campaign with it, I do quite like the basic rules framework behind it. It’s not quite rules light, but manages to strike a pretty good balance between quick and easy rules while still being relatively open in what kind of characters you can make and what they can do. The problem with classless RPGs like Shadowrun or GURPS is that character creation is a lot of work as you build your custom characters from scratch and assemble them from very small parts. On the other end you get games with character classes like Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, where your choice of class determines a huge part of your characters to the point of dictating much of the characters personalty and backstory. And of course, there’s the d20 games which combine the worst of both worlds. There are also games like Fate and Burning Wheel, which define characters more by their role in the story than their own traits and abilities. The Cypher System used by Numenera and The Strange is pretty close to what I consider an ideal approach. There are three classes (warrior, rogue, mage), three ability scores, six levels, and monster stats really come down to only their hit points and the difficulty for all dice rolls the player characters are making against them. Bit more complex than Barbarians of Lemuria, but I think not really very much. I really quite like the idea of the system, though not so much their execution in Numenera.

Actually quite a while ago, it was announced that there would be Cypher System Rulebook, which will be released this summer. I’ve seen stores that already have it for preorder with a release date of late July, but that might just be their personal estimate and nothing official. (Like amazon listing release dates for Baldur’s Gate 3 for years. Good times…) And I have to say I am quite interested in this.

My interest with Numenera started because it’s an RPG that is about explorers setting out into a vast wilderness to explore the ruins of past ages to scavange for pieces of techno-magic they could bring back to their villages and city states, where they could be of great use and further the understanding of these artifacts. Which happens to be exactly the same thing I am doing with my Ancient Lands setting. While Numenera looks good, there is just a lot of focus on electronics and robots, which is admitedly a bit distracting when you want to use a Bronze Age fantasy setting. But it’s still a game about exploring places and finding stuff with special properties, so having a book with just the cypher system to use as a base for your own settings really does sound quite appealing. Might even work well for a Star Wars or Mass Effect campaign.

While Numenera got quite a bit of attention at its release, I hadn’t really heard much about since. But while looking for the original announcement for the new book, I was really quite surprised to see how much stuff there is for both Numenera and The Strange. No clue how well it sells, but it looks like this might be a system we’ll be having around for quite some time to come.

Blue Rose returns

With quite some surprise I just saw that Green Ronin is planing a new version of their Blue Rose setting. There had been quite some talk about the original setting from ten years back on the RPG.net forum the last three weeks and some people brought up the idea of a new revised version. And apparently, people at Green Ronin had been pondering that idea themselves for a while, so now they are actually doing it.

Blue Rose is just old enough that I can say I remember the talk about it when it was originally released. (Or maybe it’s just me who’se getting old enough to say such things now.) While there was a good amount of praise and excitement for the game, a great deal of it was for the then new True 20 system, which was considered an interesting new take on the d20 system. The setting itself was something which lots of people just didn’t care for, and a good number of other people had some great interest in, but where rather disappointed with the actual realization. My own perception was that it was just another d20 game with an overly simplistic black and white setting that was disappointingly naive and didn’t really have much useful advice on how to run it.

Blue Rose is described as a Romantic Fantasy setting, as in the artistic period of the early 19th century, but based on more contemporary works like the books of Mercedes Lackey and Ursula Le Guin. While that would appear to be the entire opposite end of the spectrum from my prefered genre of Sword & Sorcery, there is actually some considerable overlapp, in that the two both are fundamentally about high emotions and personal drama. From the descriptions of popular works, I wouldn’t want to read them, but as a Sword & Sorcery GM I have a very great interest in how the genre ticks and what elements I can use to spice up my own Sword & Sorcery campaigns. As much as I love the Sword & Sorcery genre, it’s mostly about preposterous actions and crazy stunts. Which I really love a lot, but I also have plenty of friends who I think might really like RPGs, but for who slaying hordes of monsters and throwing sorcerers off the top of their towers just isn’t doing anything.

Romantic fantasy is neither clean nor pretty, and can get quite ugly and brutal, but it exists in a different context. It’s not about enjoying the thrill of battle and the lust for riches, but a struggle to save the people you care for and to repair your own broken life. It may be a genre about knights in shining armor and fair maidens held in a castle by a dragon, but you might just as well see the knight being mortally wounded or tortured in some terribly dungeon with the maiden having to put on the armor and slay the dragon herself in grueling battle, suffering grevious injuries and and the loss of her friends and allies.

The original Blue Rose game wasn’t really that good at presenting the world in such a way and explaining how it works to GMs and players, and even with the changes of the True 20 system the d20 system was just too fiddly and tactical to really work. Particularly people who are not already great fans of RPGs tend to have a quite difficult time to get into d20 games, and it’s a lot more problematic when it comes to GMs who havn’t run and perhaps even played any games before. (I’d link to Angry DM here, but he’s currently reworking his website.) But I still really like the idea behind the setting and from what I know about the AGE system from the Dragon Age RPG it seems to be a much better fit. So I am quite exited to see how this will turn out. Might even throw in a bit of money if the Kickstarter has difficulties reaching its goal.