5e-splaining the OSR

I recently watched an interesting YouTube video in which Ben Milton and somebody I have not heard of before called Daði discuss, among other things, OSR lethality:

This apparently stems from another video which Daði, a 5e DM, made, in which he put forward some claims about OSR lethality and how it can lead to player disengagement. The thesis (which has some validity to it) is that high levels of PC turnover can make the entire exercise seem throwaway, and that also - I think this is just implied - there is a phoneybaloney 'I'm really tough because I play a form of elfgame in which characters die a lot' element to the OSR player base that gets very tiresome very quickly. 

In this conversation, Ben makes the useful claim that in the early levels (really just level 1) an OSR dungeon expedition is like a heist - the PCs are so fragile they are just trying to get in, get some treasure, and get out again. I had never heard of things put that way before, but it's really an excellent word for describing what an OSR campaign feels like at the table; the 'lived experience' of play at level 1 is, more or less, exactly that.

Ben goes on to point out, however, that as soon as PCs in an OSR game gain levels they become a lot less fragile. And the game indeed very rapidly moves through the gears. Being a murderhobo in Fantasy Fucking Vietnam is a very short phase. Once a PC is 4th level the campaign looks very different.

I think Milton is here hitting on a very important point which OSR enthusiasts tend to undersell. The reason why I like playing OSR D&D is not really because I'm METAL and like PCs dying. (Though I do really like the element of jeopardy that is present during the D&D-as-heist period of a campaign.) It is rather that, if anything, it gives the players a sense of achievement which games which presume plot-immunity cannot match. The feeling of having successfully navigated a level 1 PC to level 4 or so is truly satisfying because it is genuinely difficult and nothing is guaranteed. And this, if anything, I would suggest forges a greater and more geniune sense of connectedness to a PC than those generated by a more 'silver age' 5e playstyle.

That is, the central proposition - that 'your character doesn't matter' in an OSR game whereas it does in a 5e one - is, I think, based on a flawed premise that perhaps results from people not playing OSR campaigns of sufficient length. I have never found that characters 'don't matter' in OSR games. Rather, I have found that they start off by not mattering very much, but quickly become important by dint of how much energy and time and thought has been dedicated to trying to make sure they survive. They come to matter a great deal, and that is what the process of low-level play is really all about. 

There is a tendency, in other words, to slightly oversell the difference between people who like playing 'mainstream' D&D and those who prefer the OSR playstyle. No doubt there are important differences and we could, if we wanted to, spend a long time listing them all if it hadn't already been done to death in 2008. But the emphasis on the importance of character is not, I think, one of them. OSR players love their PCs too (once you get past the 'my veins are as cold as ice and I care nothing for your special snowflake character' shtick). It is just that the relationship between player and PC is forged during play rather than during the process of generating the character.

Get Busy Writing or Get Busy Dying

I have never read David Gemmell - his oeuvre somehow passed me by. But I have been inspired to do so by a recent article in the Telegraph which caught my eye. It is sadly paywalled, but here are the main bits:

David Gemmell is our greatest fantasy author since Tolkien – but is being written out of history

In 1976, journalist David Gemmell received the devastating news that, at age 27, he might be dying of cancer. “I felt ill. A lot of weight was gone. I was passing blood,” Gemmell would recall. “It’s not a nice thought, cancer of the kidneys.” 

There was a two-week wait until the tests came back. It was the longest fortnight of Gemmell’s life, during which he did not know whether he would live or die. But rather than brood, he sat at his typewriter and wrote what was to become one of the most important British fantasy novels of the Eighties, the gritty blockbuster eventually published as Legend. 

Gemmell did not, as it turned out, have cancer. Yet those two weeks of sheer, existential terror would be the furnace in which was forged one of the most distinctive fantasy voices of his generation. More than distinctive: his grim, cynical take on the JRR Tolkien school of heroic storytelling arguably influenced subsequent generations of authors, not least Game of Thrones’s George RR Martin, whose unflinching style echoed Gemmell’s stark world-view. 

But today, at a time when fantasy is dominated by the gooey milieu of “romantasy”, there is a case to be made that Gemmell – whose worth is now being celebrated with a new collection – is not nearly as well known as he deserves and has even been written out of history. He was absent from Time’s 2020 countdown to the 100 Best Fantasy Novels of All Time and was also missing from a similar list published by Penguin Random House. Shockingly, a David Gemmell forum on Reddit clocks up just 1,000 weekly visits, while that for the Dungeon Crawler Carl series – the hot new saga in fantasy – has 275,000. Gemmell is the incredible shrinking giant of 20th-century fantasy. 

 

That’s despite an origin story almost every bit as striking as Tolkien’s admission that the opening lines of The Hobbit came to him in a delirium of boredom whilst he was marking exam papers. In the shadow of his cancer scare, Gemmell had written the first draft of Legend in two weeks – but left the ending open-ended. The novel was a metaphor for his illness, with the flinty hero Druss (modelled on his stepfather Bill Woodford) and sidekick Rek (an insert for the author) defending the crumbling fortress of Dros Delnoch against invading hordes of the Nadir – who symbolised the cancer he believed was ravaging his body. 

“It was so terrifying at that period – the only thing I could do to take my mind off the fear of dying was to write. I created a decaying fortress under siege from a terrible enemy,” he later said. “The idea was I would write in the two weeks I was waiting for the tests. If I had cancer, the fortress would fall.”

...

He was in his way, as significant a figure as Tolkien, says fantasy author James Worrad... “Someone once called him ‘English fantasy’s second wind’ and there’s some truth to that,” he tells me. “If you stand back far enough away it’s Tolkien and Gemmell you can make out, jutting up from the genre’s landscape like two mountains.”

I am sure that Gemmell's original draft of Legend was far from perfect, full of holes and inconsistencies, and read badly. But still - the idea of just sitting down and writing out a whole novel in two weeks is both an intimidating and inspiring prospect. Anybody can write a novel. You just need to sit down and write a novel. So why don't people do it more? Why haven't I done it? Why haven't you?

These thoughts chime with others inspired by an interview with Steve Jackson, of UK Games Workshop/Fighting Fantasy fame, which I recently read. In it, he describes how the other Steve Jackson, the American Stave Jackson associated with GURPS and The Fantasy Trip and others, came to London and ended up writing a fighting fantasy book:

Steve had flown over to London from Texas to talk to Ian and I about Games Workshop distributing his games in Europe. We’d mentioned Fighting Fantasy and how well it was doing. We also mentioned that competing publishers were beginning to publish their own gamebooks and, in response to this, Puffin wanted to publish a new gamebook every month. There was no way Ian and I could write an adventure a month, so we’d decided to sign up other authors to create new FF books. Anyway, the business side of things was sorted quite quickly. So we then asked Steve if he’d like us to take him to Stonehenge, or the Tower of London – all the places Americans want to see in the UK. But no. He didn’t want to go anywhere. He just asked for a desk and a typewriter. And he spent the next 3 days writing a Fighting Fantasy book!

That book apparently became Scorpion Swamp, which came out not long after. I am not sure whether he wrote the whole thing in three days, of course. But still - he did write it. He just sat down and did it. Anybody, in other words, can write a gamebook. You just need to sit down and write a gamebook.

Let me repeat, for the avoidance of doubt: anybody can write anything they like. You just need to write it. So what are you waiting for? What am I waiting for? What's stopping me? What's stopping you?

Lego Faces and the Death of Freeform Play

 

One of the saddest and strangest developments of my lifetime has been the gradual replacement of the generic Lego smiley face with those displaying fixed cartoonish expressions of various kinds. OK, it's not quite the invasion of Iraq or the 2008 financial crisis or rising inflation. But you know what I mean.

Let's take a step back for a moment in order to explain. I would like to coin a new word for you now: the word I am going to coin is genericism.

genericism, n.

The favouring of the standard, or the general; the avoidance of the specific, or the varied. 

Genericism has its benefits and its pitfalls - it is not a virtue in itself. But when it comes to toys which are to be used in imaginative play, it is important, because it allows the child (or the grown man or woman, indeed) to project whatever he or she wants into the toy in question. If all Lego faces are blandly smiling, then that is tantamount to them having any facial expression whatsoever, or none at all. They can therefore be angry, sad, happy, upset, tired, or whatever, depending on how they are being imagined in the moment. The fact that they are all generically blandly smiling means they can all readily be something else in the mind's eye.

However, when some or all Lego faces have distinctive facial expressions - when genericism is repudiated - this has the effect, perversely, of making them harder to play with. It is not impossible, of course, to imagine that this Lego figure with the permanently angry/scared/tired face is not angry/scared/tired in any given moment within the context of imaginative play. But it nonetheless feels awkward. It requires more of an imaginative leap. Within the mind's eye, the angry-faced Lego figure is angry. And it is harder to picture them as being scared, tired, or anything else.

Another way of putting this is that while the Lego creators seem to have deliberately walked down a path towards what they think of as creative variance, what they have actually really done is blandify their product. They have stopped thinking about it as a toy and instead chosen to focus on what looks good. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this is deliberate - that the 'faceification' of Lego figures, if I can call it that, is part of a wider shift away from imagining Lego as a toy and re-conceiving it as a collectable that mostly sits on shelves looking nice. If so, it is perhaps to be expected, but rather a shame. And it is connected to something that I think is rather sad about modern childhood itself: all around me I notice that children's opportunities to use their imaginations are being squeezed. Lego ought to be one at the forefront of the battle against this. But the company seems not particularly to care. 

The Revenant Lake

 

Looking around on wikipedia earlier today, as one does, I came across the entry for Tulare Lake. This is a lake in California which, although once the biggest lake by surface area west of the Mississippi, is now 'ephemeral'. It dried up in the second half of the 19th century but periodically reappears, for instance when there are high levels of snowmelt, or rain. The most recent such event was in 2023.

The photo above is from the wikipedia site and it has the arresting subtitle, 'Part of the revenant Tulare Lake near Alpaugh'. The revenant lake! God bless you, anonymous wikipedia uploader, for that turn of phrase and the image it conjures - a lake not just returned, but brought back in undeath to seek revenge on those who have wronged it.

I do not picture the revenant lake to be one from which a horde of zombies simply pours forth, although that might be a good premise for a film. Rather, what I imagine is that, long ago, there was a large lake (perhaps even a huge one like the now-almost-disappeared Aral Sea) which dried up for Wizard Reasons - probably because a powerful archmage needed to use all of the water for a spell or to power a mighty golem or something of that nature. It now lies bare and dry and salty, a little like modern day Moynaq without, of course, the Soviet-era fishing vessels:

But periodically, perhaps only every few centuries, the lake returns, bringing with it the ghosts of those who once lived in and around it (and in it!). For a year or so, a lost world is present. There are great fish, aquatic beasts and birds, serpents and water-dragons. And there are the people who long ago dwelt in and around the lake too - fishers, hunters, and also more organised groups whose civilisation was destroyed when the lake disappeared. 

The inhabitants of this lost world are, I think it is safe to say, hostile. When the lake disappeared their livelihoods and lives went with it. And so when the waters rise they emerge also, preparing to exact vengeance on the 'quick' for what their ancestors did long ago. But they had a civilisation of their own - old temples, palaces, and water-gardens - which they bring with them, and the trappings of this civilisation also return, ripe for exploration. 

When somewhere is ripe for exploration, what typically tends to happen in my experience is that D&D adventurers come and explore it. You may have found this too. When the revenant lake returns, the local people hide themselves away from its dangers. But PCs go where the locals fear to tread - and bring back with them whatever treasures, magicks, and ancient knowledge they can find...

The useful thing about this setting would be the opportunity to develop rules for underwater gaming, or even systematising a quasi-saltbox (freshbox?), both of which are in my list of 'incompletely systematised campaign types'. Anyonymous wikipedia uploader of photos - I salute you!

Why Nerd Games Matter

I was born in the opposite of a crossfire hurricane. My home town, New Brighton, lies at the end of a peninsula, and in the 1980s it felt like the end in every respect - the road to nowhere, literal and figurative. You may be familiar with Morrissey's song, 'Every day is like Sunday'? This is what it felt like to grow up where I grew up having been born in 1981:

Trudging slowly over wet sand 

Back to the bench where your clothes were stolen 

This is the coastal town 

That they forgot to close down 

Armageddon, come Armageddon 

Come, Armageddon, come

Things have revived now, as is the way of things, and the old place has become something of a hipster boomtown, full of AirBnBs and microbreweries. But back then it was just pubs, houses, and the faded trappings of a near-derelict resort town gone past tawdriness and into sadness. 

The photographer Martin Parr famously captured the New Brighton of that era in a book called The Last Resort. To look at its contents is almost unbearably nostalgic for me, now - this almost literally is my childhood. But at the same time, the nostalgia is leavened by memories of how small and tough life felt back then. The world was warmer, because it was a world of community and togetherness - a world of 'popping in for a cuppa', a world of neighbours chatting over back garden fences, a world of people sitting on their front doorsteps watching life go by, a world of whistled tunes and flirting and shared jokes with strangers - and things have got gradually colder in the time since. But horizons were narrow and aspiration and inspiration were hard to come by:

That world felt as though there was nothing really in it except us.

To an imaginative kid growing up in that world, books mattered. My family had nothing back then, but there was a library not far away, and the library had things in it there were not from my world. They were from different galaxies. They had pictures on them of things like dragons, swords, and mountains. And they told stories about things like empires, jungles, volcanoes, and epic journey. And to somebody like me, reading them didn't feel like escape - it felt like release. It felt like being given license to imagine that there was more. Not just more physically (more than litter, fish and chip shops, football and the promenade), but more emotionally and even spiritually: adventure was a thing - adventure was something that you could do.

The best of these books were Fighting Fantasy books, because they were not just books; they made you the adventurer, and the experience of reading them was more visceral than any novel. To a 45 year old writing in 2026 the flaws are visible everywhere, but to a 9 year old in 1990 they were a super-drug far more potent even than The Lord of the Rings. You were not just watching but partaking, and in the partaking you were learning, almost through praxis, that you could reach above, and beyond, and outwards. D&D of course, when that became an option, only concentrated and focused that feeling, 

Fans of Fighting Fantasy and other nerd games may enjoy some YouTube video series I've recently been enjoying, in which the series is reviewed.

This guy has been working his way through the Fighting Fantasy books, and the bulk of his reviews are of those, but he has reviewed some Lone Wolf volumes and others, too. His videos are pleasingly understated and genuine, with a very natural, conversational style.

This guy, on the other hand, is more polished and slick, and makes great use of visual aids; the downside is that he is taking his time getting from book to book, and has only so far covered the first half-dozen or so.

This guy, meanwhile, is short and to the point. English readers familiar with Match of the Day will see something of Martin Keown in him - he's intense, no-nonsense, makes everything sound important. Watching these videos is a bit like getting into a conversation with a passionate enthusiast in a pub. 

I sense kindred spirits in these fellas and give them plaudits and kudos. Maybe they were from places like New Brighton too. 

Ice, Jungle, Desert

Among my many sins, I once sat through the complete director's commentaries to the original Star Wars trilogy on DVD. In my defence, these are fascinating artefacts in their own right. Much of the commentary is, somewhat eccentrically, provided by the Ben Burtt - the sound engineer - and he goes into exquisite detail about how many of the sound effects were captured. In between George Lucas himself appears, to offer pearls of gnomic wisdom and litigate old disputes (for example: it was an outrage that they wouldn't accept Frank Oz as a nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his perfomance as Yoda in Empire), and every now and then up pops some other Star Wars luminary - Carrie Fisher, sounding like she's strung out on heroin; Lawrence Kasdan, hoping somebody realises who the fuck he is; Dennis Muren, talking about how it was that they made blaster shots look like they are moving; etc. The sheer amount of thought and effort that went into making the original Star Wars films is hereby revealed to have been extraordinary. It has been observed (I forget where) that the Big Hollywood Blockbuster circa 1980-2000 was a feat of human achievement akin to one of the ancient wonders of the world, marshalling huge amounts of energy, intelligence, craft and logistical energy over the course of years, and while this may be slightly hyperbolic, listening to Hollywood insiders talk about the process of film-making during that era makes you begin to see the point.

But I digress. What I wanted to talk about here was an observation George Lucas makes during the commentary on one of the films (possibly Return of the Jedi) in which he describes the trilogy as being dominated by three geographic themes - desert (Tattooine), forest (Endor), and ice (Hoth). I have always remembered this, as while it initially seemed a very banal point to make, its impact has grown on me. There is something archetypal about deserts, forests (particularly jungles) and icy wilderness. They function, at least to the civilised, developed-world mind, as exotic geographic 'others'. And we see them emerging a lot in fantasy literature and video games, where every setting seems to contain within it a deserty bit, a jungly bit, and an icy bit, alongside the typical, generic, bucolic temperate zone which tends to be where adventure begins.

(Indeed, while I can't think of an example right now, readers will be able to tell me about a raft of old platform games which even contained an 'ice level', a 'desert level', a 'jungle level', and so on.)

The OSR is quite light on straight up icy, deserty, or jungly settings. This is not to say that there are no products which are set in such environments, but they tend to be small-scale hexcrawls rather than deep, detailed settings-proper. 

I think this is for two key reasons. The first is practical difficulty. Arctic, rainforest and desert landscapes are unfamiliar and there is a sense with each that the environment ought itself to be a major driver of adventure and danger. This is difficult to systematise and make interesting (although there have been attempts to do it - The Bitter Reach being an example that pops to mind). 

The second is lack of familiarity. The Tolkienian tropes on which we still tend to rely do not seem to sit comfortably in non-Tolkienian environs. The furniture is just different. And therefore it feels as though the monsters, character classes, races, even magic systems ought to be different, too. This means extra work. 'My desert world is populated by desert orcs, desert dwarfs, desert elves and desert giants!' is boring - granted. So what is it populated by, then?

If I was to come up with such a setting, I think my approach would be to start with those issues in reverse order. What makes a setting really sing is its content, and the building blocks for that content would need to be gathered together first. 

And Step One in that process would I think be to get together the crew - who are going to be the main inhabitants of this world I am making up, and what is the relationship between them going to be?

An initial exercise here would just be coming up with some lists and seeing what fell together. And you could do a lot worse than just looking at what's already there. If one were to create a jungle setting, for instance, what might one jot down as likely inhabitants while flicking through the Monstrous Manual?

A trawl through the 2nd edition Monstrous Manual contains the following, what I would call, exclusively 'jungly' creatures (not including those which can be found 'anywhere', or bog standard things like giant insects and big cats): 

• Bullywug
• Catoblepas
• Coautl
• Black dragon
• Emerald dragon
• Ettercap
• Jungle giant
• Grippli
• Ixitxachitl
• Kirre
• Lizard man
• Locathah
• Weretiger
• Mold man
• Muckdweller
• Rakshasa
• Winged snake
• Tabaxi
• Tasloi
• Wyvern
• Yuan-ti
• Zaratan

Let's now thing about how we might use this list to inspire some setting ideas. I jot down these notes simply as I think of them, as it were in 'real time'; you can of course add your own.

1. Zaratans. Floating island turtles is too good an idea not to include in any tropical setting, and therefore my putative jungle setting would include them - probably within the context of a huge Amazon/Congo/Mekong-style river system which regularly floods. I would want these floating islands to be populated, maybe by Rakshasa sorcerer-lords who have a very decentralised, anarchic union, each family ruling one Zaratan together with their lizardman slaves. 

2. The Rakshasa sorcerer-lords probably I would make ape-like, rather than big cat-like. If they were big cat-like, this would clash with the flavour of tabaxi and weretigers.

3. Weretigers I would want to make more of than just occasional, werewolf-style individual 'baddies'. I would like there to be a weretiger polity in which the nobility can transform into tigers, and the hoi polloi - naturally, when you think about it - do their bidding. Would I reskin them as werejaguars? Very possibly. 

4. Any setting ought to have some region of the map which was once home to a great empire now ruined and debased, and populated by the degenerate former inhabitants. For some reason, I am struck by the idea that the setting once contained a tabaxi empire (think Maya temples and the like), but that this was conquered by a great grippli horde long ago, under the direction of a mighty couatl king. That conquest was short lived, however, as in the long-term the grippli could not be made to cohere into one whole, but split apart into many factions and minor kingdoms. Sooner or later bullywug warlords also moved in, and that entire region is now a very dangerous, chaotic jungle badland with no centralised authority. 

5. The Amazon/Congo/Mekong-style river system would also contain locathah and ixitxachitl polities, probably engaged in internecine warfare. Maybe the rakshasa sorcerer-lords use these aquatic beings as pawns in their own conflicts, playing them off against one another and deploying them where possible to make life difficult for rivals. 

6. Yuan-ti should clearly feature somewhere, but are such a distinctive concept that it almost seems pointless to fiddle with them. There is a Yuan-ti empire; it is hostile to all others. It exists in the background as a constant, looming threat, and it has agents throughout the rest of the setting.

7. Where do humans and jungle giants fit in? Some humans live in the weretiger policy I mentioned earlier. Many others are enslaved by the Yuan-ti. Others still live under the rakshasa. But perhaps also this setting contains a city-state (presumptively where adventurers start off) with a mostly human population but which is ruled by jungle giants. And perhaps the jungle giants are, in fact, akin to Amazons - tall, powerful, female rulers who hold sway over the humans but offer them protection. 

That would do for starters. I haven't really done anything with the tasloi or dragons, yet. Certainly, I could see space for an emerald dragon dwelling in a dormant volcano somewhere in the jungle. Perhaps he or she has a black dragon rival, too. But we see a setting take shape, and this would obviously be a productive way to approach designing icy/deserty settings too.