Superhero Comics as RPG Fodder: The "Good Stuff" Versus Trash-Tier

I've got capes on the mind as I'm currently playing in a very fun superhero game. This is the result. Forgive me. The results may, in fact, be applicable to other genres, but this is what is rolling around in my head currently.

I have a theory about the difference between mining ideas from "good" superhero comics (I'm thinking high-minded stuff like Daredevil: Born Again, Watchmen, Seven Soldiers) and mining ideas from trash-tier superhero comics: trash-tier comics actually make for better rpg idea-mines than the good ones.

My thought is that the intricate clockwork of a densely plotted superhero comic would likely fall apart at the table because of two factors:

A) The randomness of dice rolls in most game systems

B) Players inevitably making insane choices that throw the whole schemata out of whack because that's just what players do

Ideas gleaned from trash-tier comics, on the other hand, are already surprisingly resilient to dumb rolls and dumber decisions because they come from a place of inspired stupidity. They roll with the punches, they bob and weave like a drunkard, but ultimately they get the job done.

If anything, I think superhero rpgs are potentially the place where dumb comic ideas go to be redeemed and born anew.

Grog of Cthulhu

We are talking about Call of Cthulhu on my discord and I am such a grog when it comes to that game. I have zero interest in running any variant where you have government backing or special powers. You're going to play a law clerk who dies horribly. That's where the fun is! Everything else is pale imitation!

Speaking of pale imitations, I don't really see the point of all the Cthulhu games that aren't Call of Cthulhu. People sure seem to collect them, but they don't seem to actually ever play them. Frankly, Call of Cthulhu just about has that market cornered in ways that its imitators don't even attempt to compete against. System aside, it has a ton of great adventures, and the not-Call of Cthulhus don't. Call of Cthulhu also has some of the best supplements in the role-playing industry, but again, its direct competitors simply do not bring that heat to the table.

Trail of Cthulhu comes the closest to being worthwhile, but even that seems like a game trying to solve a problem (dead-end mysteries) from the wrong side of the issue. Fix that in scenario design, not within the system, you nerds. 

My groggiest Call of Cthulhu opinion? I think the 1920s is the best setting for it, hands down.

2024 Year in Review and the Year to Come

Looking back at 2024, looking ahead to 2025.

On the Gaming Front

By far, the unchallenged high point was finishing the Krevborna campaign that started last year. To paraphrase Arch Merrill, the "Poet Laureate of Upstate New York," it feels like "we will never see its like again." That was easily the more fun and exciting campaign I've ever been part of and I suspect it will remain something I remember fondly for the rest of my days. If you want to read the recaps from it, go here and scroll down to the posts for Lachryma Rising.

On the other hand, we started a new Krevborna campaign that had massive peaks of great times (a jailbreak! a tiki inspired infiltration adventure! a ball inspired by Dante's Inferno!) and some very low points that left me feeling down about the whole thing. However, you can learn valuable things from when a game isn't going well, so I definitely have some necessary changes in mind for the next Krevborna game I start.

Of course, we may get back to this campaign but it remains to be seen whether it has already truly ended or is just on hiatus. That's entirely dependent on how I feel about it in the future and if the players retain any enthusiasm for it after we take a break to play other people's games. We got to a decent stopping point for the campaign so I'm good either way.

Aside from the Krevborna campaigns, I ran some great one-shots in 2024. I really enjoyed the Euro-Gothic Hellraiser-themed Call of Cthulhu game we played in October, I playtested my mysterious AG3NTS of C0NTR0L game to good effect, and the vampire truck stop adventure for PLANET MOTHERFUCKER fucked.

I've already got a couple fun ideas cooking for games to come once I'm back in the GM seat, but I think I want to explore both shorter arcs and different settings in 2025. Right now my list includes a Warhammer hexcrawl in Lustria, something I'm calling Krevborna High (Dark Shadows Gothic soap opera meets Stephen Graham Jones's Angel of Indian Lake trilogy), and another thing I can't even really mention or it would spoil the experience for the players. Aside from those, I'm sure PLANET MOTHERFUCKER will get some play and hey maybe this is the year I run Deadlands again.

On the Podcast Front

Bad Books for Bad People chugged along. With only eight episodes in 2024 we didn't quite hit our once-a-month target, but there was real-life stuff that came up and, hey man, we do the podcast for free with no sponsors so the audience gets what they get. Still, I think our Sudden Death episode is one of the best we've ever produced.

On the Writing Front

2024 was the year I got back into writing fiction in a serious way. I went from completing one story in 2023 to completing seven stories--one of which is novella length!--over the course of the year. And I know you're supposed to sit down and be humble but I'm going to be honest with you: some of these stories are really, really fuckin' good. So good, in fact, that I'll probably try to find a way to get them in front of readers this year. I made it look easy in 2024. I think some people were shook by that, but that's between them and the draft they'll never finish or whatever.

I'm going to try to expand that novella into a novel-length project in 2025. I've never written a novel before, so we'll see.

In terms of game writing, I pumped out three good-ass supplements for PLANET MOTHERFUCKER this year: DEMONOID PHENOMENON, BLACK SUNSHINE, and DEAD GIRL SUPERSTAR. The problem is...that very few people saw them. PMF is a niche game, but I think I need to figure out how to help it find its audience that isn't Drivetrurpg because the game is languishing behind the "adult content" saloon doors. 

There's one more PMF supplement coming, by the way, because I don't really care about popularity or the line going up. It's tentatively titled PUSSY LIQUOR. After that, I'm considering compiling all of them with the core rules into a single book. It's the funniest game you don't own yet. You should buy it and encourage me to have more bad ideas.

I thought I would get a revised Krevborna setting book out in 2024, but it didn't happen. The manuscript is looking good, but there's still a bunch of editing to be done on it. 2025 will probably see its release. And, as always, it will be a free pdf update so if you've already bought the book you're going to be good to go. Again, I'm not in this for the money or the microfame, I'm here to help you have a good time and also make the shit I want to use in my games.

On the Discord Front

My Discord server continued to be a fun place to hang out at. You can join too, it's open invite, just make sure you read the rules and keep it cool. It's slow-paced compared to big servers, which is exactly what I want. It's also non-denominational, so don't show up if you've got a weird axe to grind about a style of gaming, authors who are more popular than you will ever be, etc. Had to clean out a couple fools for being foolish this year, and I'm happy to do it again.

This year I started streaming movies for the folks there alongside running games and shooting the breeze. The Krevborna Film Festival and PLANET MOTHERFUCKER Film Festival were both blasts, and I'll probably run both again in 2025. I love sharing some messed-up movies that people maybe haven't seen before.

On the Movie Front

2024 was a phenomenal year for horror movies, particularly in the theaters. My favorite theatrical releases of the year:

• Abigail 
• Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
• Blink Twice 
• Furiosa
• Immaculate
• Kinds of Kindness
• Lisa Frankenstein 
• Longlegs
• Nosferatu
• The Substance

On the Reading Front

I managed to hit two reading goals in 2024: read a hundred books and finish re-reading Stephen King's Dark Tower series. Of the books I read over the course of the year, these were my favorites from among the new-to-me pile:

• Alisa Aerling, Smothermoss
• Nathan Ballingrud, Crypt of the Moon Spider
• Monica Brashears, House of Cotton
• Essie Fox, The Fascination
• Kate Griffin, Fyneshade
• Lee Mandelo, The Woods All Black
• Sara A. Mueller, The Bone Orchard
• Grady Hendrix, My Best Friend's Exorcism 
• ML Rio, Graveyard Shift
• Richard Swan, The Justice of Kings

On the Music Front

We went to see Ministry, Alice Cooper, and Rob Zombie again, which was cool. I also souped up a hand me down guitar so I can jam doom metal at home. Need some dope records? These were the cream of the 2024 crop for me:

• Ad Infinitum, Abyss
• Castle Rat, Into the Realm
• Chat Pile, Cool World
• Chelsea Wolfe, She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She
• Funeral, Gospel of Bones
• Knocked Loose, You Won't Go Before You're Supposed To
• Oxxo Xoox, +
• Ponte del Diavolo, Fire Blades from the Tomb
• Ulcerate, Cutting the Throat of God
• Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats, Nell' Ora Blu

That was the year. Let's see what 2025 will bring.

The Cool Friend NPC

What do NPCs in an role-playing game do? To put it another way, what function do they have that justifies the time spent detailing a fictional person beyond "Uhh, yeah, the blacksmith's name is Johann and he says he'll fix your armor for 25 gold pieces"?

Some types of NPCs are fairly self-explanatory, like the "Quest Giver" or the "Nemesis." Those are useful, but I want to write a little bit about a type I haven't seen people talk about much that I really like putting into my campaigns: the "Cool Friend."

The function of the Cool Friend NPC is to make the players feel like their characters are Cool just by knowing the Cool Friend. 

A Cool Friend NPC doesn't have to be powerful to be Cool. Nightsong, the black metal bard from my current Krevborna campaign, is Cool because she's famous, people recognize her, and being pals with her nets the PCs respect; when people realize that the characters are friends with Nightsong, it changes how those people treat them, which in turn makes them feel Cool. They're in, they know somebody important, and a little of that swagger rubs off on them.

You can also use a Cool Friend NPC to shore up a deficiency that the party has, at least in the short term. In the previous campaign, the Widow (a sentient automaton NPC) stuck around because the party lacked any physically strong characters until more players joined the campaign. In the same campaign, Serafina (a grave robber) was a Cool Friend NPC who excelled at stealth, a skill nobody had overly invested in. Viktoria Frankenstein, from the same campaign, was a Cool Friend that the rest of the world feared and could provide medical aid unavailable elsewhere--as well as the use of her chateau as a base of operations.

If your players are smart (and why would you play with dummies?) they will realize that the Coolness of their Cool Friend can be used as a tool to get shit done. Coolness can obviously be leveraged in social situations; using their Cool Friend might open doors to them that would otherwise remain closed. As an example, in my current campaign the players used Nightsong's blasphemous, rage-filled musical performance to start a riot in a prison, and in the ensuing chaos they were able to bust an imprisoned witch out of jail. In this example, Nightsong's Coolness was something that enabled their Coolness--nobody in the setting had ever successfully staged a jailbreak from that prison, but now that group of characters has. 

Of course, acquiring a Cool Friend shouldn't come too easily. A Cool Friend NPC is a bit like a good piece of loot, in that sense. You gotta put in the time to earn that shit.

Just remember that a Cool Friend is there to add to the player characters' Coolness rather than upstaging them. Being the Cool Friend doesn't mean they're a protagonist.

Besides basking in the Coolness imparted by a Cool Friend, here's the other trick: if the players think their NPC buddy is Cool, it will light one fuck of a fire under them when their friend is endangered. You will never see your players so motivated; they will move heaven and earth to save their Cool Friend from peril. Trust me on that.

RIP Steve Albini

I found out yesterday that Steve Albini has died. It's hard to express what a huge influence he was on me in my formative teenager years. I might not have started a punk band in high school if it weren't for Big Black. I probably wouldn't still be making game stuff with a DIY ethos or prioritizing doing creative work with a sense of ethics divorced from the desire for mainstream success if it weren't for Steve Albini. 

To celebrate the man, let me suggest that you listen to some of his music or maybe read some of his writing.

Two Kinds of Game I Have Little Love For

This might be what the kids call a "hot take": there are simply too many small games out there with names like Tunnel Jerks or Tomb Losers or Die in a Damp Cave or just Mound that all essentially do the same thing. They all seem to be bought by the same people too. I find their existence and proliferation mystifying.

This might be an even hotter take: I think one of the biggest scourges in the indie rpg space are games that are actually more like graphic design projects than actual games. It often feels like all the effort went into the presentation and visual tomfoolery instead of the making the game feel complete or even fun. The folks behind that stuff seem like the kind of nebbishes who spend more time figuring out the perfect placement of the band patches on their "battle vests" than on actually listening to metal.

Mad About D&D

There are plenty of valid reasons to dislike D&D as a game or to avoid Wizards of the Coast as a company. I haven't played D&D in over a year at this point. And yet, D&D seems to have a special quality (its popularity, most likely) that makes some people go insane. It makes them lie, to others and to themselves.

For example, have you noticed that the British guys who complain the loudest about WotC's "corporate stranglehold" all seem to be drowning in Games Workshop plastic miniatures? Look inward.

As another example, it's funny how some indie rpg people are constantly banging the "D&D is crowding out all other games" drum when there are demonstrably more indie games now than in any other point in the hobby and it's never been easier to distribute and/or get paid for your niche indie game. 

D&D isn't the reason your game isn't a bestseller; it's just that you don't have a bestseller on your hands. The milquetoast fantasy juggernaut isn't keeping your ten-page game about coconut farmers trying to resolve family conflict from widespread success--most people just aren't going to be particularly interested in that premise.

There's also irony to be found in the "not all games should be based on D&D's mechanics" perspective, even though it's one I largely agree with, because a lot of the people who hold that view seem to have no problem with everything being either Powered by the Apocalypse or Forged in the Dark based. (It used to be Fate that filled that role, but no one cares about Fate anymore.) On the trad side of things, the Year Zero Engine seems to currently occupy a similar "this system could and should do everything" space.

I have a theory: the most unhinged D&D hate actually funnels people to D&D because regular gamers see that stuff and want to go over to where people seem more normal and less "I'm frothing mad about a game I don't even play." 

Touching grass is always an option, of course.

Anyone Who Tries to Convince You That You Didn't Have Fun is a Jerkoff

I really do try to be non-denominational when it comes to role-playing games and the various scenes that form around them. I consider how other people have fun at their gaming tables to be not my business, so it's not worth getting het up about one way or another. 

However, I've learned the hard way that not everyone is like me. In particular, I have a bone to pick with the way that some indie gamers are deeply invested in convincing people that they aren't actually having fun with the games they play. 

Other kinds of hipsters don't do this. Music and film hipsters will just assume you have bad taste if you like stuff they don't approve of or if you aren't into what they like. The worst of the OSR guys simply think you're simply having the wrong kind of fun if you're playing games not in their niche. But the kind of indie gamer I'm taking about here believes that you're either deluding yourself into believing you had fun or they try pathologize you--you've been "abused" by bad game design into thinking you had fun or have otherwise been harmed by gaming in a way that never really holds up to scrutiny. 

My theory is that the genesis point for this attitude is Ron Edwards stating that Vampire: The Masquerade causes brain damage. Now, I take Edwards at his word that he didn't mean that statement as attack, but it's pretty easy to see why people took it that way. The problem is that other folks picked up on the idea of pointing at people who play different games and proclaiming that there must be some wrong with them and ran with it. 

The idea is now part of the Forge's legacy, and you see it pop up fairly often in places--storygames.com, Something Awful, Reddit--where indie gamers hang out. The license to imply, if not outright state, that there is something actually wrong with other kinds of gamers and that they aren't really having fun has seemingly become embedded in the culture of that scene.

It makes sense that this strange variety of hipsterism is so deeply entwined with the indie scene because that scene often takes the premise that people aren't having fun playing rpgs and that "good design" can fix that as tenets of faith. For me, is where indie theory doesn't align with my experience. It is not my experience that people are unhappy playing rpgs. I've not met these people. I'm skeptical that sane people will keep doing a thing as a leisure activity if it's making them miserable. 

Even if we take it as a fact that these unhappy people exist, it always ends up sounding like their problem has less to do with a game's design being "bad" and more that there is a people problem at work. No amount of considering "the Big Model," "robust game design," or implementing shared narrative authorship will fix a problem like "this one guy at the table is being a tool and it's ruining my fun." The real solution to that issue is that you just stop inviting that guy to play. In fact, I strongly suspect the "a well-designed system can fix any interpersonal issues" guys are often the shithead players at their tables, as are any jerkoffs who want to convince you that your fun wasn't real.

The D&D Playtest Doesn't Make Me Want to Play D&D

It's amazing how every playtest packet for the new D&D is followed a few months later by a video wherein they walk back most of the proposed changes. It feels like rudderless design led by a community adverse to change plus the designers' lack of a vision about what the game should be and what the purpose of releasing an "update" to it is. 

Somehow this thing is supposed to come out next year?

Is anyone excited by the videos on their Youtube channel where they go over "satisfaction scores" from their surveys? On one hand, I feel that they're doing a terrible job of selling the idea of fantasy adventure because they're never talking about what will make the game fun or dramatic to play. On the other, I think it's such a mistake to cater this much to player feedback. You either create the game that makes your heart sing or you're a marketer in disguise.

How I Craft a Campaign Arc

We recently wrapped up a pretty momentous arc in our Savage Krevborna game. This is a post about how I set it up; I'm making this post to show you the techniques that I used to make an arc that was both super-satisfying to my players (or so they say) and easy to implement on my end.

To sum up what this arc entailed: in an early adventure, one of the pieces of loot that the characters found was a chart of the cosmos. In a few of the adventures that followed, they discovered complimentary cosmic maps that could be overlayed on the one they already had; doing so changed the nature of the maps and indicated a location in the mountains connected to the mysteries of the cosmos.

Meanwhile, in a different adventure, the characters had taken a mysterious comatose woman encased in a glass coffin from an isolated lighthouse. They decided that they would attempt to lift the curse that was keeping her unconscious. When they accomplished this goal, the first thing the woman said was a warning that something ominous called "the Red Window" was opening. And it turned out that the location on their cosmic map was the site of the Red Window.

Everything came together, and they decided that their new goal was to shut the Red Window before something eldritch and terrible slipped out into their world.

In play, I think this felt very cumulative--like pieces falling into place as planned. Which means I must have had all of this elaborately planned from the start of the campaign, right?

Lol, lmao.

* * *

One piece of advice I give in the Krevborna book is this: "keep an eye out for the things that pique your players’ curiosity and catch their imaginations, then give them more of that. Shine the lantern’s light on the things that grab them." This campaign arc is a great example of that advice in practice. What it means is that you do not have to write a novel's worth of plot before you start playing; your players will gas up the car as they drive around in your sandbox.

Technique #1: When you're planning out the loot in your adventures, add a couple items that seem interesting, but that you have absolutely no idea what they're for.

The first cosmic chart they found was essentially a throw-away item. Just a star chart with some otherworldly atmosphere. Nothing to it. But one player immediately took an interest in it. Noting his excitement about this inconsequential item let me know that I should make it consequential going forward. Thinking on it between sessions pushed me to the idea that there were more cosmic charts that were additive with this first one. Note that I still didn't know that they would point to the Red Window. I didn't need to know that yet.

Technique #2: When the players set a goal, you follow it even if it leads to Hell.

I was surprised that during the lighthouse adventure the players ended up taking responsibility for the woman in the glass coffin's well-being. I'd run that adventure before with different groups, and they had all inadvertently killed Rebecca by shattering the glass coffin. But this group made it clear that they were going to find a cure for the curse keeping Rebecca in a state between life and death. They handed me a plot hook for future use; I could have made adventures that veered in a different direction, but that would have been folly. If they're hot on something, you should be hot on it too.

But I also gave them choices of where they could potentially go to seek help reviving Rebecca because this wasn't a railroad. They choose to travel to Creedhall and ultimately attempt to get Viktoria Frankenstein to aid them. 

Technique #3: Always cross the streams. 

I was already thinking about cosmic matters since they had an interest in the cosmic charts, so it made thematic sense to have the root cause of Rebecca's stasis to be eldritch in nature. When they effected a cure, Rebecca's first words tied everything together neatly: she spoke of an eldritch entity she had encountered while a soul was detached from her body inside glass coffin. And it just so happened that their cosmic charts were pointing them toward an encounter with that same entity. To move toward a conclusion, different strands need to entwine.

There were other small elements I also managed to tie in here. For one, they had made a mechanical NPC called the Widow their friend and companion, which let me slip in--via Viktoria Frankenstein--that the Widow's animating lifeforce also originated in the eldritch cosmos. This was connected to both the place on their cosmic map and to Rebecca's curse. For another, when they were in the process of stealing the third map they needed to complete their set, I had them discover that a noble was harvesting the brains of people who had been similarly afflicted with Rebecca's curse; in fact, he had a spot open for Rebecca's brain.

Technique #4: Add some urgency when it's time to resolve an arc.

Now that they had all the maps indicating a location and some basic knowledge about the Red Window and what resided there, all I needed to wrap this up was some anxious impetus to get them moving. The idea that the Red Window was opening, and that something really bad was going to come slithering out of it, put them in motion toward nipping that in the bud with some finality.

Technique #5: Blow your FX budget on the finale.

I wanted to make resolving this arc special, so I tried to give them a sense of being involved in grander things. The idea of leaving Krevborna to enter a tear in reality to another plane entered here, as did a set of otherworldly stairs leading up into the sky. And, of course, confronting the eldritch entity at the end of the rainbow had to feel BIG and WEIRD too. When they got there, killed the avatar of a cosmic horror, and accomplished what they set out to do, it felt like epic heroism on their part because they stakes were high and they had to sweat while doing it.

Bonus Technique #6: While you're resolving a set of plot hooks, keep throwing MORE plot hooks at them to see what sticks.

Even as we neared a focused goal for this arc, I kept seeding the game with potential hooks for future arcs. They met an NPC during their heist of the third part of their map who they now know has been kidnapped by their foes and is in grave danger. On the way to the Red Window they failed to stop a vampire lord from being released from her underearth prison; now they know she's sucking blood of innocents all across the land. They heard that one of their allies seems to be searching for something of great import. All or any of these might be the basis of the next arc.

Do I know what will happen? Have I got it all planned out in advance? Hell no, but I can't wait to find out what's going on and I can't wait to see how they fight their way out of the scrapes to come.

Irreproducible and Fleeting

"A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite and it leaves one unsatisfied." 

- Oscar Wilde

One attractive thing about playing role-playing games that I rarely see talked about is that they are instances of irreproducible, fleeting fun. Everyone who goes to the theater for the newest Star Wars or Marvel movie will see the same movie, but the game you play at your table is a singular, ephemeral instance that will be different from all other games. 

Your estimation of a film might differ from someone else's, but you saw the same movie. Not so with role-playing games. Even if you're using a published setting or prewritten adventure, other tables playing through the same material will have a different and equally unique experience. We might all start with the same rulebook in hand, but where we end up is, by the nature of this type of play, inevitably distinct.

This, to me, if one of the hobby's greatest selling points. In an age of homogenized entertainment that is engineered to be fairly smooth and frictionless for a global market, the game at your table is an experience that can't be bottled, isn't test-marketed, and wasn't birthed by committee to hit a target demographic. It is a transient, ephemeral, and personal thing--you literally had to be there to really "get it." It's also a part of the hobby resistant to the forces of monetization and professionalization: you own it, collectively but only ever temporarily.

Savage Krevborna

After posting one of the adventure recaps from our Savage Krevborna game to Twitter, someone asked me why I went with Savage Worlds as the "engine" of the game and how game play has differed from when I using D&D as I have in years past. It's a good question that I thought might be worthwhile exploring in more depth than Twitter really allows for.

Ease of Play

I went with Savage Worlds because I played it a lot years ago and generally think it's a fun game; at one point I probably played more Savage Worlds than D&D, so there was a layer of familiarity there and it didn't present a big "re-learning curve." Savage Worlds's basic rules also seem pretty easy for players to pick up. Although most of my players in this game had no previous experience with Savage Worlds, they got the basics down really fast.

On my end, as the person running the game, Savage Worlds has a lot of stuff I get to play with. By stuff I mean: enemies, powers, and bolt-on widgets to enhance the game. Especially taking the Fantasy and Horror Companions into account, I don't have to spend time kit-bashing cool stuff for the game. I can instead focus on the adventures and overall campaign, as is my preference. 

Krevborna and "Genre"

Savage Worlds felt like a good fit for Krevborna because despite being billed as a "generic" system, it's actually quite geared toward Big Pulp Action, which is mostly what Krevborna is about. Krevborna is a Gothic setting, but the setting focuses more on the swashbuckling, monster hunting end of the Gothic rather than the quiet, contemplative Gothic. Krevborna has always been more Brotherhood of the Wolf than Wuthering Heights, so mechanics such as the Wild Die, exploding rolls, and Bennies it fits the intended experience pretty well.

Character Possibilities

In many ways, this is the facet most interesting to me: one immediately obvious difference between running the Krevborna setting with Savage Worlds instead of D&D is that Savage Worlds opens up a lot of character concepts that fit the setting, but don't really don't fit D&D's class-based system. For example, two of the the characters in the campaign are a noblewoman-turned-prioress and an anatomist, neither of which map easily to a D&D class.

Catarina, the mysteriously widowed noblewoman, has a skillset focused on occult lore, persuasion, and shooting a pistol; I suppose she could be a rogue in D&D terms, but thievery is not her bag. Since she's now the prioress of a convent devoted to a primordial sea entity, cleric or warlock might seem plausible, but she wields no magical powers. (And I'm pretty sure her player isn't too interesting in dealing with the extra bookkeeping that comes with rpg magic systems.) Simply put, I just don't think Catarina exists in D&D, which is a shame because she's a great character!

Pendleton, the rogue anatomist, feels even less like a D&D character. Again, great character! But the mechanics of D&D don't really have a place for a non-magical medical man. (He has since begun to explore alchemy, but he had no magical abilities at the start of the campaign.) It's worth nothing that both Pendleton's and Catarina's "archetypes" are entirely natural to the notion of Gothic fantasy, but they remain a bit alien to D&D's vision of standard fantasy.

As the necromancer in the party, Raoul corresponds more cleanly to a D&D class, but I think Savage Worlds does a better job on delivery the fantasy of being a necromancer. D&D might make you wait until you gain a few levels to get a subclass that really brings the flavor you had in mind to life, but in Savage Worlds it's easier to get the kind of character you have in mind right away. 

Also, to cap it off, I think we've been enjoying the more organic character growth possible when the character exist outside of a class-based system. Catarina's player has been able to focus on the elements of her character that interest her, while Pendleton's player has been able to branch out and add a whole new toolkit (the aforementioned alchemy) to his character. Raoul's player has gotten to pick the type and flavor of his necromancy; man, he's gonna love being able to summon a giant skeleton going forward.

Call of Cthulhu and the House Rule Rubric

There are many ways to judge whether a role-playing game is "good." I've talked to indie gamers who define "good games" as the ones that reliably preproduce a specific gaming experience without fail no matter who is playing. I've met OSR guys who define "good games" as ones that stick to Gary's vision of how play is supposed to proceed. I've chatted with casual gamers who define "good games" as having rules that "get out of the way" and let them get on with having fun.

Here's a different rubric: a "good game" is one that inspires a minimal amount of house rules. In this case "good" means the game feels complete and comprehensive for what it attempts to do. It neither has too much nor too little, and it works as intended. 

(Note: I'm not adopting this rubric as the one true lens through which to judge games and define fun. It's a single possible rubric, and it's obviously one with limited utility. But it does have a certain elegance to it.)

By this proposed rubric, Call of Cthulhu is a great game. I'm never really tempted to monkey with the rules. At all. I just don't see anywhere in the game's rules where I could intervene with an innovation of my own that would improve the experience.

As much as I think the small changes present in Call of Cthulhu's 7th edition are nice additions, I also think it's entirely reasonable to play an older edition without those changes. They're nice little flourishes, but I don't think it would even occur to me to create them as house rules on my own.

I'm not sure there's many other games that fulfill the terms of this particular rubric quite as well as Call of Cthulhu.

The OSR as Afternoon Culture

Some seventeen notable empires rose in the Middle Period of Earth. These were the Afternoon Cultures. All but one are unimportant to this narrative, and there is little need to speak of them save to say that none of them lasted for less than a millennium, none for more than ten; that each extracted such secrets and obtained such comforts as its nature (and the nature of the universe) enabled it to find; and that each fell back from the universe in confusion, dwindled, and died.

- M. John Harrison, The Pastel City

Probably about a minute after it began, the first proclamation that the OSR was "dying," or that it was already "dead," was posted to the internet. I've seen an upswing in chatter about the Death of the OSR lately, but in my view it lives on as long as someone out there is hammering B/X into a pleasing shape. 

Every attempt to pinpoint the OSR's date of death is asking the wrong question. Instead, I think it's more useful to ask "How has the OSR changed?" or perhaps even "How is it continuing to change?" 

What follows is my answer to the first of those question based on my remembrances and limited perspective. I was there for a good deal of what people think of as the height of the OSR on Google+, though I have no idea if it really qualifies as a height or not--better days could be on the horizon, for all I know. 

That "for all I know" is something I want you to keep in mind as you read what follows because there came a point where the OSR's online culture became antithetical to what I'm interested in; after that point I was merely a spectator, despite my earlier work in that vein.

I still continue to write for the occasional OSR or OSR-ish project. You can find my name in issues of KNOCK!, the Book of Gaub, Deluge, etc., if you feel the need to check my credentials. Nevertheless, I want to stress that I am not an expert on the OSR, I do not see myself as a central figure, and I am decidedly not a historian of old-school gaming. What follows is how I saw things and how I remember them. If you disagree with what I have to say, well, I'm fine with that. None of this really matters much in the grand scheme of things. Remember, Elfgames: Not Serious.

The Appeal of the Free-Wheeling Era

When I first stumbled upon the OSR, there were two things that made it appealing to me. First, the effort to keep older D&D rulesets available and in-print through games such as Labyrinth Lord and OSRIC felt like true labors of love. In comparison to modern retroclones, those games often featured clunky writing, amateurish art, and nightmarish internal organization, but their deficits were made up for by serving a purpose in an era where official, easily accessible pdfs of B/X and AD&D did not yet exist, so it would be childish to find fault with them--especially since they all had free versions that anyone could get ahold of as needed. A flawed version of a game you like is preferrable to 4e D&D or Pathfinder if you were one of the many people who didn't find much to love in those newer games.

Second, people were building on the free retroclone rulesets and, more importantly, they were often sharing the fruits of their imaginations for free! There were blog posts with new monsters and spells, pdfs of full dungeons and settings, and collaborative projects that came into existence simply because people enjoyed the act of creating together within their shared hobby. 

The uniting thread of the above two items was this: anyone could get in on it. There was no barrier to entry besides having a fun idea and following through on it. Those two elements, and the free-wheeling culture it enabled, persisted for a while, but a change just visible on the horizon altered both of them.

From Projects to Products

In my view, a cultural shift began when a few publishers and creators pivoted from retroclones as free, community-centered projects to boutique products intended to seize the moment (and the dollars). To be clear, I have nothing against people getting paid for their creative work; I have several gaming products I'd like people to buy, so I'd be a hypocrite to say otherwise. 

That said, I think the pervasive move toward monetizing the DIY hobby space was a more disastrous cataclysm for the OSR than the shuttering of G+ because it fundamentally changed the culture of the scene at that time. 

Free supplements gave way to Kickstarters promising deluxe books in hardcover, with fancy paper, color art, and honest-to-god ribbon bookmarks. You can see where that led; where once OSR folks derided the full-color, expensive hardbacks published by WotC under the Dungeons & Dragons moniker, they now prized the same level of production values. 

It's common for the bigger-name OSR-derived games to now come in expensive, over-produced packaging--in some instances these games and their supplements are pricier than what WotC and Paizo produce. The difference is more aesthetic than idealistic, cultural, or intentional. It's clear that these are boutique collectibles, not a revitalization of the TSR era or a strictly hobbyist approach to creation. 

This change had additional detrimental effects on the the OSR end of the G+ experience. There came a time when the push for monetization meant that your G+ feed was, more likely than not, a wall of Kickstarter announcements, pleas to back various Patreons, and sometimes outright panhandling. It felt like a community that once saw each other as united in a shared hobby now looked at each other as walking wallets to be rifled.  

Truly DIY projects didn't end during this shift, but it became more and more difficult for them to find an audience and they often weren't seen as "serious" work within the community that birthed them. For example, I remember one prominent OSR blogger announcing that he would never again buy a print-on-demand product; only books made with offset printing and "real" bindings counted, in his opinion. I can't imagine a position more contrary to the OSR's DIY origins. That kind of hipsterism always leads to a demarcation of who matters and who does not, creatively speaking. And it did. 

Egalitarian Community vs. Personality Cults

One of the biggest changes in the OSR's culture that accompanied this shift toward products-over-projects was the formation of cults of personality. The introduction of professionalization in the OSR often separated the community into creators and consumers. Certain "Big Names" became the quasi-official writers, artists, and designers in the scene; they were the ones elected to create within the OSR space, and to an extent were also the tastemakers who decided what was orthodoxy, permissible, or "true" about the scene in general.

This was not always by design or an element of malfeasance. It's absolutely true that some people simply develop a solid track record of creating great products and achieve a measure of respect and name-recognition off of that. It's also true that even in the OSR's early days there were people who jockeyed for position and generally threw their microfame around in unseemly ways. Once a constellation of would-be luminaries was established, hopefuls sycophantically positioned themselves as willing to fight various boneheaded culture wars on behalf of Big Names who had less than stellar intentions--usually in hopes of "'winning" a seat at the Star Chamber's table.

The worst offenders in this period were the people who enabled obnoxious behavior. For a group that prided itself on rejecting corporate orthodoxy, many within it were amenable to following the loudest and most abrasive voices in the room. Of course, those same enablers have largely disavowed the jerks they previously hoisted around on their shoulders, but they should have been less spineless at the time and they should be more embarrassed now by their past behavior. 

The rise of the auteur class created casualties: collaborative efforts saw a sharp decline, the always-on-offer G+ games dwindled, and the OSR fragmented into smaller niches based on loyalty to specific retroclones, publishing imprints, cliques, or "manifestos." 

(Political views would later lead to more splintering into competing tribes, but that's a post of its own that I will never write.)

The kicker is that during the monetization and professionalization period it was clear that some of the Big Names who came to prominence as content creators didn't actually play rpgs very much, if at all. That should have been a clear sign that things had changed, and not for the better.

In summary, I have no recollection of the OSR dying, but that is how I remember the OSR changing in the period before G+ closed its doors. 

The OSR Today

Are things different now from when I bowed out? It must be, things always move on. I often think the amount of free (or at least cheap) stuff on itch.io sounds like a positive development, and I can find nothing bad to say about the occasional enthusiastic creation I see coming from the trenches, but I haven't delved into it in any meaningful way in years--and I'm not likely to as my interests are now elsewhere.

I still sometimes detect the fallout of the period under discussion that continues to not be to my tastes. The focus on zines in the OSR should be extremely my shit--I love a small, cheaply printed DIY project--but many of the ones I've seen are so slick and professional that they don't really count as zines under my personal definition. (If you are hiring a graphic designer to make your zine you are not actually making a zine, in my opinion. Please note that my opinion carries zero weight.)

When I look at the names of people currently working in the OSR space, I don't recognize most of them. That's probably both a good and a bad thing. I hope they're having fun. I hope they're actually playing games with their friends; that's the stuff that really matters. I also hope they've learned to avoid the pitfalls from the period I've been talking about in this post.

All of this to say: I don't know where things stand currently.

But is the OSR dead? No, I suspect someone is cross-hatching their dungeon map right now as I type this final line.

The Dream of Dungeons & Dragons

Way back when I was a kid, I knew about Dungeons & Dragons long before I got to play it. This was the era where D&D toys were on the shelves and a D&D cartoon played on Saturday mornings. There were commercials on tv for D&D and ads in comic books promising untold fantasy adventure. I was captivated by it, so much so that I vividly remember having a dream about what it must be like to play D&D.

In my dream, D&D was more like a board game than an rpg because I didn't yet really understand what an rpg was. As I imagined it, the players gathered around a special table that had been set up with a three-dimensional dungeon map. They bought figures for their characters and the monsters they wanted to use--each sold separately, of course. The map had walls with secret doors embedded in them, pit traps that would drop your character's figure into peril, and portals from which monsters would emerge to challenge you. The table had built in special FX: you could trigger sounds of agony when a character was slain, the crack of a bolt of lightning being unleashed, the creak of an iron-bound door being opened...

It was probably possible to play D&D like that in the 80s if you had the time and money to put into it, but when I finally got my hands on a Basic D&D box set we instead made do with graph paper and our imaginations. We were young teenagers lucky to have weird-shaped dice; even lead miniatures (yes, they were made out of lead then) were often out of our economic reach.

Oddly, I think WotC's future plans for D&D are a lot like my dream of what it was like--save for the fact that they plan to dole out the special table, the interactable map, the characters, the monsters, the special FX, and everything else virtually. Linking D&D more closely to a virtual tabletop, parceling out fun bits of the game as loot boxes or as a subscription service is not that far from what I envisioned.

And therein lies the rub. I got into D&D because I thought it would be fun to have all that fantasy stuff at my disposal, but I kept playing D&D because it was fun to make my own fantasy stuff. 

I have no use for a virtual tabletop--I mostly play online and I've never felt the need for one. I haven't pushed a miniature around a series of one-inch squares in years. Special FX? That's what our words and our minds are for; our FX budget is higher than anything you could try to sell us.

I think the fight over the OGL 1.0 is largely a red herring. The OGL has never been as good a deal as people make it out to be. In fact, I tend to think of it as a byproduct of people internalizing the idea that they need corporate permission to be creative, and to me that is a horrifying, stultifying notion. But don't take my word for it: here's the Electronic Frontier Foundation's analysis of it.

The good news is that however the OGL shakes out, it doesn't matter that much for the hobby. Tired of Hasbro's shenanigans? Yes, there are other games you could try, and it looks like a whole bunch of new Not Quite D&Ds are headed our way from teams with the experience to pull it off. And you already probably own enough D&D books to keep playing until they throw handfuls of dirt on the lid of your casket.

2022 in Retrospect, 2023 in View

Below is a look back on my 2022 and a look forward to what may come in 2023, or at least the bits that are pertinent to this blog.

Gaming in 2022

2022 was an excellent year for gaming. I got to run more sessions than usual, and I had a variety of players at my virtual table--many of whom I had never gotten to play with before and some who had never played before at all! 

I made a "resolution" of sorts to run at least five different systems in 2022 as a way to break out of the "D&D rut." I actually managed to run games in seven different systems: Blades in the Dark, Dungeons & Dragons, Cryptworld, Tales From the Loop, Savage Worlds, MORK BORG, and some homebrew nonsense as well. I even got to play a bit since Aos ran a bunch of Spelljammer games.

Gaming in 2023

I might make a similar resolution for 2023 to run at least five different systems. One particular success for me was setting aside my usual D&D campaign for the month of October to run a series of horror one-shots. I'd like to do that again in 2023. Tales From the Loop was a blast to play and it was requested again by one of the players, so I can see giving that one a go again. I'd like to try running one-shots of Shivers, Vaesen, and Monster of the Week as part of the Halloween season offerings.

I'm also interested in running a short campaign set in Krevborna using a different ruleset than 5e D&D. It's funny, I was thinking about how I'd like to run even more non-D&D games in 2023 for a few weeks right before the OGL 1.1 kerfuffle broke out. Said kerfuffle didn't exactly change my mind on that; what a mess. Right now, Savage Worlds is the leading contender for what I have in mind for a Krevborna campaign.

In addition, I really want 2023 to be the year I get an Inquisition-centric Warhammer 40k game going. Dark Heresy with some house rules to get the starting characters up to Dan Abnet-levels of action seems the most likely route to what I'm going for there.

Publishing in 2022

Strahd Loves, Man Kills did pretty well; I put out way more issues of the zine that I expected to. I also had my work appear in venues not of my own creation. I had something in Deluge and an article in Wyrd Science that I'm rather proud of.

Publishing in 2023

I'm not sure I'll be continuing with SLMK in 2023, though, as it has reached an expected point of diminishing returns. I actually have three more issues written and laid out, but if they don't make it to print their content will be cannibalized elsewhere. If you would like to see the zine continue, consider picking up a copy.

That said, you can definitely expect more zines from me in 2023, if everything goes according to plan. It seems likely that this is the year that Planet Motherfucker returns, brasher and dumber than ever before. I might also drop a small, self-contained game about Satanists in Space.

2023 may also be the year that a revised Krevborna book drops. Right now it's looking like it will have the same page count, but vastly expanded content--a feat I've only been able to manage because I've now got a better understanding of layout. The bullet-point style of information delivery won't be going away, but I think I have a better handle on deploying it. A new Krevborna book will probably be even more system neutral than it was before and even easier to fit into whatever system you like.

Writing in 2022

I started writing a short story in December of 2021, but due to various reasons I didn't get much done on it. However, I picked it back up in December of 2022 and managed to finish a first draft before the year's end. It was pretty well-received by the folks I sent it to, but I plan to get back to it and polish it in 2023. Top of the list changes include brutalizing the main characters a bit more and tying the themes together a bit more tightly.

Writing in 2023

I've got a few other draft stories I could pick back up. Maybe this is the year. Creative writing isn't really a priority for me right now, which is crazy considering how it was my singular focus in my 20s.

Reading, Watching, Listening in 2022

I did really well on the reading front, working through a hefty number of books and comics across the year. 

Reading, Watching, Listening in 2023

Looking back, one thing I didn't do is read any Tanith Lee. What the fuck was I thinking? I will remedy that in 2023. Also, there's a few series I'd like to polish off in 2023: I plan on reading the last Ravenor book and then reading both of the Bequin books that are already out. I'd also like to finish the Johannes Cabal books.

I should make more of an effort to read nonfiction. 

I haven't found a decent list of books coming out in 2023 to get excited about, but I've got enough of a backlog of things I want to read that it doesn't matter if the publishers decide to just not release books this year.

Music-wise, there are a number of gothy symphonic metal bands releasing albums this year, many with new singers, so we'll see how that shakes out. I think we're getting a new King Diamond record this year, which rules. 

I saw a list of movies coming out in 2023 and it looked pretty dire--dominated by franchise films I have zero interest in. It might be a good year to revisit some Hammer Horror favorites.

I never know what's coming out in the world of comics. I've got an itch to read some Batman soon, that's all I can tell you.

Lists as Far as the Eye Can See

We did a Best of episode of Bad Books for Bad People that recaps our favorite media we engaged with over the year. If you want more, here's my best of lists for 2022:

Top Ten Reads of 2022

Franck Bouysse, Born of No Woman

Christopher Buehlman, Between Two Fires

Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None

Coy Hall, The Hangman Feeds the Jackal

Alex Pheby, Mordew

Molly Pohlig, The Unsuitable

Laura Purcell, The Corset

Elisabeth Thomas, Catherine House

Catriona Ward, The Sundial

Jose Luis Zarate, The Route of Ice and Salt

Top Ten Listens of 2022

Behemoth, Opvs Contra Natvram

Blind Guardian, The God Machine

Cult of Luna, The Long Road North

Deathless Legacy, Mater Larvarum

Deathwhite, Grey Everlasting

Dream Unending, Songs of Salvation

Hangman's Chair, A Loner

Ghost, Imperium

Messa, Close

Therion, Leviathan II

Top Ten Watches of 2022, "Big Screen"

Crimes of the Future

Last Night in Soho

The Menu

The Munsters

Nightmare Alley

Nope

The Northman

Pearl

Phantom Thread

X

Top Five Watches of 2022, "Small Screen"

And Then There Were None

The English

The Heart She Holler

House of the Dragon

Wednesday

Top Five Reads of 2022, Funny Books

Adam Sarlech

The Goon

Graveneye

Helheim

Moonshine

One-on-One Play

I recently had a game scheduled for two players. Unfortunately, one of the players had Real Life Stuff come up the day of the game and couldn't make it. No harm, no foul; things happen, life intrudes, and sometimes you've got to take care of business. However, the remaining player and I had nothing better to do, so we decided to play through the scenario one-on-one anyway.

I probably wouldn't consider playing one-on-one with little pre-planning in every system I run, but I felt pretty confident we could pull this off on short notice. A few factors helped ease the way. I've been running 5e D&D for a very long time, so I feel pretty confident in my ability to modify stats on the fly to adjust difficulty as needed. The scenario I was planning to use felt like a reasonable adventure that one character could see through to the end. The character who would be going on the adventure is a barbarian with the Tough feat, so he's ridiculous durable and hard to kill--a veritable one-man army--so he had a good chance of surviving anything the adventure threw his way.

That said, the character in question isn't a jack of all trades, a generalist, or even particularly well-rounded. He's great at taking hits and he gets an unusually high number of attacks per round for his level, but he's not without his weak points. Specifically, he's not really adept at investigation skills and he's a bit deficient in social skills as well. This is actually important to keep in mind.

A character on a solo adventure obviously has no compatriots of equal capabilities to rely on in situations that don't play into their strengths. A character without social skills can't defer to the party's face when someone needs to be persuaded, a character without martial skills can't count on their allies to soak up hits and deal damage in their stead, and a character without a depth of knowledge has on one to fill in the gaps for them. 

What they need to do, then, is find creative ways to navigate around their deficiencies. This navigation is always an opportunity for character development that a player wouldn't get otherwise in the context of an adventuring party; left to their own devices, a player learns something about how their character approaches problems they would generally let someone else in their group handle instead. If you get the chance, I highly recommend one-on-one play if the opportunity comes up for exactly this reason: it will reveal aspects of a character that would not come to the fore during normal party-based play.

2021 in Review

Another year in the End Times. Here's what I got up to in 2021:

According to Goodreads, I read more in 2021 than in any other year that I've kept track of. Apparently spending the majority of your time indoors because there is a pandemic going on will give you a lot of book time, who knew?

My favorite books of the year: Catriona Ward's Rawblood, Andrew Kelly Stewart's We Shall Sing a Song Into the Deep, Caitlin Starling's Yellow Jessamine, Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House, and Tanith Lee's At the Court of the Crow. In general, it was a good year for novellas, but maybe that's just where my attention span was at in 2021.

I also caught up on or finished two lengthy manga series: Claymore and Black Butler.

If you want to hear more about my favorite stuff of 2021, check out the Best of the Year episode of Bad Books for Bad People.

Speaking of the podcast, we came out of our unplanned for hiatus and managed to get seven episodes out into the world despite months of dormancy. Our episode on Requiem Infernal already seems like a fan favorite.

On the publishing front, I published the first two issues of Strahd Loves, Man Kills and wrote five more issues for publication in 2022. The third issue just dropped, so if you haven't picked it up yet keep in mind that I've already sold more than half the print run. You can expect the zine to get a little bigger in 2022--I'm expanding it from 28 pages of content to 32. I also contributed to the second issue of KNOCK, The Book of Gaub, and another rpg project that should see the light in 2022.

Just Use...Wardukes???

I don't claim to have any sort of meaningful answer to the issues to representation, colonialism, and racial essentialism in Dungeons & Dragons. If you want a nuanced take on those topics, you should read Allandaros's Productive Scab-Picking: On Oppressive Themes in Gaming. Seriously, go read it right now; there's not going to be a better blog post than that this year.

If you stuck around, all you're going to get for your troubles is a really stupid idea. If you're concerned that orcs, goblins, and the like might map to real-world ethnic and racial subjectivities...just replace those creatures with wardukes. 

As far as I'm aware, no one has ever claimed that Warduke is poor representation, so it's probably okay for your fictional characters to kill droves of them in a game. If you're worried about the indulgence of violence against individuals possessing free will, I suppose you could always go the Star Wars route and have wardukes all be clones of the original Warduke. 

Stat-wise, short wardukes equal goblins and kobolds, hairy wardukes equal bugbears, etc.

Wormtongue

"You should let me add a boon die to this
attacl because my character has the
high ground and also the wind is
blowing in a favorable direction."

When I started playing Dungeons & Dragons with my friend Kevin in grad school, he introduced me to a slang term his previous group used: wormtonguing. 

The phrase comes from Grima Wormtongue, the advisor in Lord of the Rings who pours rhetorical poison in Theoden's ear. (Although, to be honest, the fact that his name is Grima Wormtongue should have been a clear indication that he was not a guy you could trust with matters of state.)

In a gaming context, wormtonguing is when you're trying to convince the Dungeon Master that the course of action you're proposing is reasonable or even that your success is probable. You're wormtonguing when you're lobbying for some sort of bonus to your roll because of circumstances you see as favorable to whatever your character is attempting.

It seems like many Dungeon Masters hate being wormtongued; I've seen complaints about wormtonguing-esque behavior, although I've never seen it explicitly defined as such. The slang phrase Kevin and his group gave to this tactic hints at its slyness, selfish guile, and potential duplicity; that said, they clearly used the phrase in good humor. You could roll your eyes at a wormtonguing player, but it was accepted as a matter of course and as an expected part of playing the game as a group. You could laugh about a particularly bald-faced attempt at wormtonguing after the fact, but its use was enshrined as part of their social contract.

Personally, I love it. To me, when a player is attempting to sway things to their advantage, it's a sign that they're engaged with the game. They're thinking about the world, they're considering their character's goals and desires, and they're invested in the situation and outcome currently unfolding at the table. I suppose it could become wheedling, whining, or demanding when used by an unpleasant player, but you shouldn't be playing with that kind of person anyway. In my eyes, a good lashing from the wormtongue most often indicates excitement about the game. It's a sign that things are working as intended.

So, yeah, wormtongue me, baby.