Spider Queen

Yikes, what a title. Save it for the book, am I right? This is quite a long one, as it takes on quite a few points and blog posts. But there are some insights here, both from others and, I hope, from me. 🕷 Authenticity The Glatisant rolled around again, and fed me a slew of new blog posts. Chasing them down the rabbit hole, I found a discussion of FKR and OSR methods of play that focused on the interesting concept of authenticity. The best way to define authenticity is probably in contrast to its opposite, illusionism. This concept, from Hack and Slash, is exemplified by a technique called  the quantum ogre : The players go left, they face an ogre encounter; the players go right, they face the same ogre encounter, because it's what the GM has prepared. Even if you haven't heard of it in those terms, you'll probably have played at a table where the technique was used. The idea is that the GM has crafted an experience for the players, here involving an ogre encounter, and t...

I've been having ideas left and right for stuff that I want to write about, and spilling out words onto the page, but in the tangle of offshoots and cul de sacs that follow, the bolder ideas have been getting lost in the murk. If you want to hear me ramble on at length about something very few people will really care about, you can read my doctoral thesis when it's done. So I've cut about 75% of this post (no really), to focus on what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is war stories. You see, ttrpgs are all about stories - no duh. But there are two types of stories (at least in trad gaming) as I see it. I call these "narratives" and "war stories". A narrative is what you get when a GM sits down ahead of time and thinks up what action the coming session is going to contain. It consists of set-pieces, and connections between them. There are a few reasons people do their game prep in terms of narratives. One is ease: You generally have to do l...

I've hit on an idea for how to run XP in a way that will work for my upcoming sandbox game using The Black Hack. The system itself should be pretty much transferrable to any classic D&D derivative that uses race-as-class (I've hacked the "kindred classes" from B/X into my game), or with some tweaks for ones that don't. The one complaint people consistently lodge against The Black Hack is that it doesn't contain much scope for levelling up. This confuses me slightly - as far as I can tell, it offers about as much scope as the early editions of D&D on which it's modelled. That is, fighter-types get better at hitting things, magic users (in the broad sense) get access to more powerful spells, thieves' skill at thief-y tasks increases, as does their backstab damage, and of course everyone gets more hp. Anyway, as I understand it, advancement in these games is largely supposed to be driven by acquisition, especially of magic items - your +2 to hit e...

I've only just realised that's a punny title. It appears I can't help myself. I'm always trying to think of how to explain the OSR, especially to relatively inexperienced gamers, who are often the ones to rock up at my table. It's tricky for a number of reasons, not least of which are that it's largely defined in contrast to a playstyle these new players will have little or no experience with, and that the priorities of the OSR as a quote-unquote "movement" apparently keep shifting. But I think I've found a new way to describe it, the way I'm going to explain to people, from now on, why you'd play using an older ruleset, or even something completely different that's designed to evoke  an older ruleset. Do you remember hearing about ttrpgs for the first time? It's an experience I imagine you and I share, and share with a lot of people. I can't remember the actual event itself, but I definitely remember the experience - confusion ...

Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the release of Fellowship of the Ring into cinemas. If you don't know which movie trilogy Fellowship opens, first off, welcome to our planet - it's not always this messy, we're going through a rough patch and haven't had chance to clean up in a while. Second, you're going to need to get familiar with The Lord of the Rings if you're going to understand any of our culture for the last twenty years, not just as it relates to science fiction and fantasy (although definitely that), but just in general. Daa, Daa, Da-Da Daaaa There are obvious, close-by examples with which fantasy fans will be familiar. The video game behemoth Skyrim wouldn't have happened, or wouldn't have been recognisable, but for the LotR trilogy. Sure, the Elder Scrolls game series was already a thing, and Skyrim would probably still have been made, but the thing that always struck me about Skyrim was that it was a fantasy rpg that was played not just ...

At the risk of stating the obvious, the B/X cleric is a little underpowered compared to their modern equivalent. Or should I say that the modern cleric is over powered compared to their B/X ancestor? I've blogged before about how the Cleric's niche has been removed by increments, to the point where there's now nothing particularly unique to the class. But this doesn't necessarily diminish the appeal of taking the cloth; the fact that the cleric has no particular specialism in the modern game means that they end up being pretty darn good at everything, arguably embodying the role of kickass warrior-spellcaster much better than either the Paladin or the Arcane Knight, and all without much in the way of religious requirements or limitations. But 'twas not always thus. It seems almost absurd now, but the B/X Cleric started play with no spells. This means that they, in fact, couldn't make use of their trademark healing abilities until several successful dungeon-craw...

I've been typing up a lot of stuff lately, then revising it or throwing it out. Partly this is due to a dearth of actual play  on my end - other than having two wonderfully enjoyable games at Grogmeet this month - but partly it's just that I keep straying away from my Golden Rule. It's not enough, for me, just to avoid the sort of Angry GM performative internet anger I could so easily slip into. On top of that, I feel I actually have to try to say something insightful about topics that get me all riled up without  descending into a sort of toxic rant. That means I'm constantly chasing what frustrates me about, say, the Kenku Structure , without achieving any actual catharsis about anything. So here's a sort of "thought for the day" style post, just briefly following up a train of thought to make sure I've actually posted something. These (giant) dice will determine your fate... Modern play and classic play in ttrpgs are often distinguished using the c...