OSR Guide For The Perplexed Questionnaire

Zak S posted a fun questionnaire on his blog: http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2018/10/osr-guide-for-perplexed-questionnaire.html

1. One article or blog entry that exemplifies the best of the Old School Renaissance for me:

My chosen blog entry is not game mechanic or even directly play related, but speaks to something I think is important to the OSR: http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2008/03/pulp-fantasy-d.html

2. My favorite piece of OSR wisdom/advice/snark:

If you, as the referee, are rolling dice, then stick with the numbers you rolled. Instead of fudging, don’t roll at all when you’re not prepared to accept a possibly “adverse” outcome.

3. Best OSR module/supplement:

A Red and Pleasant Land by Zak S: http://www.lotfp.com/store/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=190

4. My favorite house rule (by someone else):

I like most of these: http://tenfootpolemic.blogspot.com/p/the-ten-foot-polemic-unified-house-rule.html

5. How I found out about the OSR:

I started playing Castles & Crusades and that led me to the rest of the OSR.

6. My favorite OSR online resource/toy:

http://save.vs.totalpartykill.ca/web-apps/

7. Best place to talk to other OSR gamers:

As of about a week ago… MeWe!

8. Other places I might be found hanging out talking games:

Facebook.

9. My awesome, pithy OSR take nobody appreciates enough:

Balance is a lie.

10. My favorite non-OSR RPG:

King Arthur Pendragon

11. Why I like OSR stuff:

The system is familiar but what’s done with it is as creative as hell.

12. Two other cool OSR things you should know about that I haven’t named yet:

Flatland Games’ Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures is a truly unique OSR game. I would describe its aesthetic as “hearth fantasy”. I am not sure if that is actually a thing, but I think it sufficiently descriptive of Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures that I think you’ll know what I mean even if you’ve never heard the term before. Mechanically, what makes the game unique is its playbook approach to character generation which means that as you generate your character’s ability scores you also generate their personal history and their relationships with other player characters. The game is also intended to be low preparation for the referee, with playbooks to generate scenarios as well. The campaign supplement, Further Afield, has an excellent mechanic for collaboratively building a campaign setting which would be easily adaptable to other fantasy games as well. Check out Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures here: https://www.flatlandgames.com/btw/

13. If I could read but one other RPG blog but my own it would be:

Probably Jeff’s Gameblog by Jeff Rients because it is still going: http://jrients.blogspot.com/

I also really appreciate Swords & Stitchery: http://swordsandstitchery.blogspot.com/

But, my favourite RPG blog (now long abandoned) is/was Grognardia (http://grognardia.blogspot.com/)

14. A game thing I made that I like quite a lot is:

My son has been drawing and designing monsters and I have been helping him make game stats for them, which he finds exciting because then he can fight the monsters in D&D. Example below!

15. I’m currently running/playing:

I am currently running Lamentations of the Flame Princess and King Arthur Pendragon (see https://www.savevsplayeragency.net/2018/10/12/what-im-running/).

16. I don’t care whether you use ascending or descending AC because:

It’s your game, do what you want. How could that possibly bother me?

17. The OSRest picture I could post on short notice: