Skip to main content

Sustainable RPGing: A Letter to the OSR

By
As I gathered my resources for my OSRIC game I couldn't help but notice something. There are only two books, both out of print, by a major publisher. The City State book is by Sword and Sorcery, I am pretty sure they are White Wolf. The Gygax Names book is by Troll Lord and I am not even sure they qualify as a major publisher. The setting is coming from Goodman Games, some of their stuff is available in B&N so I guess they could be major. But, Points of Light II is written by Rob Conley so it keeps its small community cred as far as I am concerned. Everything else is self published in some fashion. Written by people whose blogs I read.

I get a lot of use out of the Names book, so it was hardly purchased for this campaign. The City State book has been sitting on my shelf for years, I just saw a chance to use it (maybe, if needed). So every single dollar, minus printing costs, spent on this game went right back into the gaming community. Those dollars stayed in gaming. They didn't get taken out for dividends, the weren't used for more popular things by a corporate entity. They went to the creators who will most likely use them to make/buy new gaming stuff.

I am going to nickname that sustainable gaming. Not in any real economic sense, obviously everyone has day jobs, but in the sense that we can get everything we need from each other. I am just using a popular buzzword to describe it. We could do this electronically, or through word of mouth before. Now we can do it by buying actual, quality print products.

As I have said before, I am not an old school purist. I love 4th edition, GURPS, and I am looking forward to trying out this WFRP 3rd edition box I have here. Old school gaming is one of many, many styles I enjoy. I even enjoy "story" games. That means that you are sustainable from the point of view of an outsider to your movement. You can draw people in, and they can make do with only your products. I don't know if this was a planned goal or not, but you accomplished it.

The idea of that much quality, community generated content is something I can get behind. You have created your own little RPG economy. So give yourselves a hand OSR. This can only make it easier to get new people in.

You have several excellent rule sets, a good volume of modules, you are really starting to put out different and interesting campaign settings, and you have the two best gaming mags out there right now. Keep up the good work.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hex Crawls

By
Those of you who have been reading this blog know that I have never run a megadungeon before. I have always used more realistic dungeon settings, keeping all underground areas to a minimum and keeping the over all size of castles and the like fairly small. There is another style of gaming I have never indulged in: the hex crawl. I have never seen hexes as discrete chunks of the map. I always just used them as a guide to find distance if they were present and not worrying about themif they were not. I have always taken a more continuous view of overland maps. This is another streak that will be ending with my upcoming OSRIC game. I will be using James M's Outdoor Map as a starting pont in my campaign. I will be heavily modifying it for my purposes but most of the features will stay the same. I will be adding my own versions of Castles Blackmoor and Greyhawk to the map. I have been struggling with how a hex crawl works. How do I know if they find features in the hex and isn't 5 m
Post a Comment
Read more

Traveller: Session 5

By
    This is part of an ongoing campaign. You can find the other sessions over on the sidebar. This session was run on October 27, 2022. This session contains secret communications between me and the individual players. This means that these recaps do not cover everything that happened in the session. I will be reporting only the information that all players had access to.   131-1116   After the council meeting ended, Nashu, Archduke Ishuggi’s chief of staff, pulled him aside. Following the revelation that Yuri Lang, the emperor’s would-be assassin, had been a member of Archduke Adair’s intelligence service and had been involved in a combined operation with Gateway Intelligence, she had the staff run overlap checks on all recent contacts. The goal was to determine if there were any more unexpected connections between people that could be a threat to Ishuggi or the emperor.   She learned that, in 1113, Yuri Lang (“Baron Pazi”), Zurzi (Archduke Bzrk’s chief of st
1 comment
Read more

Wilderlands: Session 36

By
    This session was run on May 1 st , 2023 They continued heading east towards the beach with the rock rolling along beside them. They were not sure where they had washed ashore with respect to the various port cities on the coast, so the best plan was to reach the beach and then decide how to proceed from there. Around noon, the skies darkened and white flakes began to fall from the sky. As it was around 85 degrees, they realized that it could not be snow. It turned out to be ash. The ashfall was quickly mixed with a moderate rain. They discovered that the rain stung when it hit unprotected flesh and raised small red welts. Drex found shelter in a hollow beneath the roots of a large tree and they waited out the acid rain for a couple of hours before resuming their journey. They reached the water as it was getting dark and spent an uneventful night camped just off the beach. In the morning, they could see masts on the horizon to the north, but nothing to the so
Post a Comment
Read more