#patrick stuart

OSR -- Old School Renaissance? Revival? A style of making and playing games, where the focus is on the experience of shared imagined space, not narrative plots or arcs.

A style fostered by a community.

That community was ugly. Many alt-right-leaning white dudes. It sheltered abusers, like Zak S -- a person who, to my shame, I'd been a fan of.

That community was good. Many key figures were queer / trans. More so (to my impression) than any other RPG community (even other indie groups). Non-white folks, like me.

The popular TTRPG eye remembers the OSR for its ugliness, not its inclusivity. Probably because the assholes were loud. And because the non-white / cis / het-ness of folks was rarely advertised as a community selling-point: "Look at how diverse we are!"

The latter aspect made me feel welcomed. My work -- entirely informed by my SEA context, as it's always been -- got attention based on its merit, not its topicality.

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The OSR as I joined it was based on blogs, and on G+. When G+ was shut down, the community had a diaspora.

You hear about BOSR (British OSR), or NOSR / NuSR. You used to hear about SWORDDREAM? I think FKR (the Free Kriegsspiel Revival) is an offshoot of the old community? There are a million Discord channels. Questing Beast, on Youtube.

The blogs are still going strong.

I can't keep track of all the places folks have ended up. I do feel bad about that -- that I'm less community-oriented, that I work more in isolation, now. I squat Twitter mostly. Twitter is not a good place for a creative community.

But it is what it is.

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An article Ewan Wilson was writing about the OSR got spiked at Polygon. I was one of the folks he emailed questions to.

Ewan's questions prompted this bout of sentimentality, I guess?

Here are bits from email I wrote him, in reply:

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The OSR scene began on blogs? That's certainly how I discovered it. I can actually remember the specific post that hooked me:

Patrick Stuart / False Machine, reading James C Scott's "The Art Of Not Being Governed" -- a history of the Zomia region of mainland Southeast Asia, a place of fluid cultures and peoples that have traditionally resisted the settled states surrounding it -- riffing on the historical information in Scott's book, spinning them into RPG campaign ideas.

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A facet of the OSR scene is its willingness to use popular rulesets as a shared language.

Dungeons & Dragons (tm) not as a WOTC corporate property, but D&D as a community vernacular. (And D&D is just one example.)

Folks like Emmy Allen and Luka Rejec have talked about this quite eloquently, I think?

I think the OSR prioritises making stuff for games rather than crafting the bestest, most elegantly-designed game possible. If you are stuck arguing about which language works best for poetry, you'll never get to the point where you actually start making and sharing verse.

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I associate the OSR style with possibility, too. I'm not sure why.

Mainstream WOTC D&D is trapped in a self-referential loop, recycling its own Forgotten Realms-adjacent tropes. Then you have the vast forest of licensed RPGs: "Alien: The RPG", "Avatar: The RPG"; "[Insert Popular Nerd IP Here]: The RPG".

Many indie-RPG communities prize genre-emulation -- here's a game where you can mimic the narrative shape of a slasher film; an urban-fantasy novel; Legend of Zelda.

Not that there is anything wrong with this. But if emulation is where you start and end you doom RPGs to a secondary role -- forever in the shadow of other arts.

For sure the OSR has its pop-culture and games-media touchstones; the scene loves to riff on metal album covers and Dark Souls a lot.

But I'd argue that -- relative to other RPG subcommunities, in my experience -- OSR creators are willing to push further down the rabbit-holes of their particular obsessions more often.

So, yes: Dark Souls and metal music. But also references weirder, personal, and as-yet-untapped: Zomia, punk zines, walks in backyard forests, Birkenhead folklore, the Permian Period, Moebius, East Malaysian myth --

Composted together to the point they become game things utterly unlike anything else, and the stories / experiences you can have in those game things you can have nowhere else.

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The blogs are still going strong.

Today I was reading this series of posts, a theory-based critique at D&D, the OSR, and games design in general:

"the goal of what we call "old-school play" is not to create a story but to traverse a fantastic space guided by desire, such that any story which emerges is incidental and retrospective (much like stories that emerge from 'real life'). edwards prescribes that the goal of play is to create a story, elevates this prescription into a truth about play as such, and then claims that players who do not play with this aim actually fail to meet this aim because they are mentally damaged. perhaps this can be remedied by playing the correct game, or maybe not, but regardless the implication is that by playing the correct game, one can avoid brain damage.

my take is to not let salespeople convince you that you must buy their products to be politically or mentally correct, and on the flip side do not entitle yourself to the enjoyment of other people."

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4. All four are worth reading.

Today I was also reading the very first OSR blogpost I ever read, about Zomia. It is still as good as it was, six years ago:

"The Lisu, aside from insisting that they kill assertive chiefs, have a radically abbreviated oral history. "Lisu forgetting, Jonsson claims, "is as active as Lua and Mien remembrance." he implies that the Lisu chose to have virtually no history and that the effect of this choice was to "leave no space for the active role of supra-household structures, such as villages or village clusters in ritual life, social organizations, or the mobilisation of peoples attention, labour or resources."

18 Radically forgetting tribes. How far can you push that? Ancestor free tribes, then further away, one-year tribes, then in the reaches of the deeps, the one-day, impossible even to understand as they remember only for one day.

Patrick's blog turned 10 this week.

Type: Common Zug-Zug

Species: Zug-Zug

Other Names: Red Hunter, Red Tyrant, Hunting Burrower, etc.

Location: Zug-Zugs can be found in either hot, dry plains or in heavily wooded areas

Coloration: Dark red fur, blood red quills, black claws, and yellow eyes

Size: 6'0" feet (adult), 3'0" feet (young)

Weight: 250 pounds (adult), 25 pounds (young)

Language:

Human, Zug-Zug Tongue

Personality: Relentless, fearless, tireless and very smart. Zug-Zugs are some of the most dangerous monsters humans have ever encountered, they see everything in their territory as theirs and theirs alone with few monsters save for other Zug-Zugs willing to challenge them for dominance. Very few creatures can pose a threat to these mighty beings such as large human communities and as well as monster communities and because of that the Zug-Zugs who have villages residing in their territory hardly advance past tribal stage due to the Zug-Zug with kings, tribe leaders, and religious leaders who attempt to unify the tribe into large masses end up "going away" a short time later

Abilities: Zug-Zugs are apex predators within their territory with good reason, they have abilities that make them difficult to kill as well as make them dangerous to fight off if one encounters them:

Impenetrable Hide: The hide of a Zug-Zug is strong, really strong. So strong in fact that bullets and blades can pierce through it

Deadly Quills: Zug-Zugs have long thick quills covering their backs which prove extra protection against would be enemy attacks and making grappling Zug-Zugs all the more difficult. The only major downside with the quills is that Zug-Zugs' movement below ground is greatly hindered and making crawling backwards in their tunnels impossible without digging forward  

Deep Digger: The claws of a Zug-Zug are strong, thick and durable like their limbs, allowing them to dig deep into the earth to form their burrows or slay their prey. The burrows can be a big and deep as it likes and can make smaller ones for quick escapes

Double Jointed: The limbs of a Zug-Zug are double jointed and durable. Any attacks aiming at the legs or arms, such as war-hammers would only dislocate the limb before it pops back into place

Parental Instinct: Zug-Zugs are not only deadly monsters but great parents too. Zug-Zugs are solitary creatures and really interact well with others of their own kind who for the most part see as a threat to each other but when they due meet other than fighting its for mating season as either the male or female would sneak behind the other in order to mount them. Once mating is done and the female has given birth to a single kit (they rarely produce more than one kit) they will protect the kit with their lives. An odd twist to this parental instinct is that will never harm children ever no matter if they belong to humans or monsters, they have no problems hunting and killing adults but children, such as those who get lost in the woods, will gain a Zug-Zug guardian and keep them safe

Big Eater: Zug-Zugs have large appetites and are capable of eating anything but their most favorite food is honey. It is capable to eating things that are dead or alive, some even lay corpses out and hide in them in order to spring out and catches hungry vultures

Info: Zug-Zugs are human sized monsters and some of the most dangerous creatures people have ever encountered capable to killing off large herds of animals to starve towns and villages and even setting up traps for would be enemies to fall into just to protect its vase territory. The Mystery Kids were unfortunate enough to encounter a lone Zug-Zug who was hibernating under the gnome village deep within the woods of Gravity Falls. In order to appease the Zug-Zug, the gnomes end up abducting some towns people including Wendy and her friends which caused the kids to go after them before they become the Zug-Zug's next meal

P.S. Zug-Zugs are based off the monster of the same name featured with in the OSR (Old School Roleplaying) book Fire on the Velvet Horizon

Let’s start the week with something jaw dropping: this is Silent Titans (2019), by Patrick Stuart, illustrated by Dirk Detweiler Leichty. It uses a light version of Chris McDowall’s Into the Odd rules (so light they fit on a bookmark). It is weird.

You have fallen through time, lost your memory and are exploring the Wir-Heal, a place where time and space have been poisoned by the dreams of those sleeping Titans. Animals in the Wir-Heal wear strange masks and talk. If humans stay too long, they turn into green haired, grass eating beasts. It may not be obvious at a glance, but there is a central mystery to solve. To deal with all of this means dealing with the Titans – you need to pull out their ego machines so they fall more fully asleep and stop making reality vomit all over itself.

For an RPG that  you might think is “gonzo,” Silent Titans does a good job of holding your hand through it all. Yes, the maps are strange (all the images in this post are dungeon maps, by the way – let that sink in) and the art is bonkers, but the text is grounded, full of excellent GMing advice and presented largely in bulleted lists, which makes it easy to parse (sort of – Stuart does like flowery language, even in bullets). The experience of Silent Titans is bizarre, but the execution is playable.

The art speaks for itself. It is rare in RPGs to have art so beautiful be so integral to understanding the world of the game. They could have presented Silent Titans in a more traditional way, just like you can choose to run it using your preferred OSR system instead of Into the Odd, but then it wouldn’t be Silent Titans anymore. This was designed to be a particular experience. That is rare and wonderful.

With 45 or so years of RPG history under our belts, we tend to think more about what RPGs are and less about what they could be. Silent Titans is 100 pages of Could Be – gorgeous, boundary pushing potential, waiting to blow your mind.