RPG – MRAAKTAGON

Invincible RPG AAR and thoughts

I ran the first two scenarios from the new Invincible RPG box set with all the bells and whistles (counters, maps, etc.) that it comes with. My gang is a bunch of teenagers who are used to Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC) and this was a big change for them to have maps, miniatures and powerful characters with a bunch of stuff they can do. Most of them had seen the show, but a few had not. While not a review of the whole game, I’m going to compare this to Champions and of course FASERIP.

NOTE: this has SPOILERS (but not for the whole adventure).

The Mauler Twin fight

This is a fight in a warehouse with the Mauler Twins. There’s lots of stuff that can (and should) explode, and some bystanders that can get squished too. This went pretty fast but there was complaining about just how much stuff the characters had on their sheet (again these guys play DCC exclusively) with both the powers and talents, it’s a lot but they got the hang of it. Atom Eve was considered underpowered until the player realized that he could create three levels of armor and then started doing tricks with her matter control power. Bulletproof took out the gun turrets and one of the Maulers very quickly (the Charge move/attack that uses a strength roll rather than fighting is pretty great) with some good rolls even though the Maulers have health of 17. He did get dropped by the last Mauler’s energy weapon and suffered the bashed up injury effect (so needed a few days to heal up). The other effects from their weapons (stunning and taking stress), I didn’t use much as there wasn’t a lot of time before they were beaten down (2 vs 4 heroes will do that).

Social scene

Between each battle there is a the chance for characters to get in a social scene with their team mates or others, this is acted out but has the mechanical effect of removing stress from characters between fights. Stress is gained from many things, but mostly from ‘pushing’ (rerolling) skill checks. A big combat will burn a LOT of stress.

This I assumed would be the most awkward as these guys were teenagers, but it turned out likely far better than with your normal ultra-cynical adult players. The prompt cards worked great and the only issue is that the two guys that had not seen the show were a bit out of the loop (they had Robot and Bulletproof, so not complicated social interactions). In a normal game without the prompt cards, these guys would likely struggle to come up with anything, so those helped. If you are running a game with custom characters or heroes from the back of the book, I would make a bunch of potential ‘prompts’ for your game before you go into a session.

Machine Head fight

This is a big one that requires a ton of work for the GM. The players run one hero each, the GM has to run five at the same level of complexity as the player’s one character! This is very dangerous ground as it gets into why Exalted is such a bad game and impossible to run for any GM, and why 13th Age, which abstracts creature powers which trigger based on the attack roll, is so much easier (and the players don’t know the difference anyway). That said, because the enemies and their powers aren’t super complex in Invincible, this was manageable even with all 5 villains, easier than Champions and a bit easier than FASERIP. Most powers just do one thing in combat and don’t spiral off into sub-powers. With this many combatants, it’s also OK to not play optimally as the GM, but do the best you can. For sure you will forget a Power effect or Talent here and there though. Especially GMs first time with this system/game: read all the enemies before hand a few times.

The fight went as follows, Magneattack locked down Robot (because he’s made of metal) and started using him as a battering ram against the other heroes, most of which were tied up by Tether Tyrant. KillCannon just blasted away from a distance at anyone that didn’t have the ability to dodge (ie, used both their full and quick action for the turn). The magma villain was using his ability to slugfest (plus his emanation power of hot lava) from a zone away. We had to call it before we finished the fight, but it looked like it could have gone either way IF Titan continued to fight for the Machine Head side (which he wouldn’t have). These were a bunch of villains with interesting powers, but WAY lower health than the Mauler Twins, so the players were trying to queue up Bulletproof so he could do a charge move and knock the crap out of them one by one. Atom Eve was able to throw the piano and sofas around to get extra dice. I let her use the ‘trap’ special effect even though it was a ranged attack (trap is usually reserved for slugfest only).

My main question as a GM is when to PUSH rolls as the Villains (ie, Reroll their attack). A good roll will put the fight in a totally different spot, and a great roll will destroy players/enemies. Vs the Maulers, Bulletproof rolled five 6’s and mopped the floor with one of the Maulers and smashed him into the other one. If the villains get a great roll, you can kiss one of the characters goodbye for that fight, which I’m assuming is by design.

System Review

I’ve played/run (mostly run) Champions, TMNT (Palladium), FASERIP and the weird dice Marvel game that came out in 2012 (Marvel Heroic Roleplaying).

Let’s compare this to Champions first. Running it as a GM, Invincible is way easier and cleaner than Champions. The powers are clean, the dice pools are small and the outcome of opposed rolls, powers and attacks are easy to manage in comparison. The level of heroes were were using were out of the fight quickly so it wasn’t just a constant sluggathon. Also the ability to use stunts and to use powers in odd ways rather than everything being tightly controlled was way better. I don’t want to rag on Champions to much as it was my first Superhero RPG and one that I had a lot of fun with as a kid but this was way better to run any day of the week. Making characters in Champions is fun, but once they hit the table, it’s not so great.

FASERIP

Invincible is a cleaned up, modernized version of Marvel’s FASERIP game by Jeff Grubb, with a dice pool instead of the big chart, where characters spend extra successes to do a variety of stunts rather than just one or two from a list (stun and slam were the FASERIP ones). Like FASERIP, Invincible uses Zones for movement (excellent) and abstracts flying levels (also excellent). There are a few things that are far superior to FASERIP and that is how slugfests work and how stunts work. The game has shaved off some of the edges that made FASERIP really great though as well.

Slugfests are when two characters are in the same zone and use their fighting (or sometimes strength) stat to duke it out. If a player has a quick action left for a block, it becomes an opposed roll. The character that wins the opposed roll can do some damage INCLUDING the defender on a counter-attack. This makes slugfests more interesting (even without stunts which I will get to below) and makes the fights thankfully faster. If you can’t block you are going to get hit (which some characters don’t care about much) and if you do block there’s a chance you can simply pummel your attacker. This is great.

Stunts are NON-POWER stunts tied to either slugfest attacks or ranged attacks. Stunting has been a boon and and issue to RPG’s since the 1990’s and many RPG’s have had trouble integrating them (especially Exalted), with the gold standard being Mythras with it’s special effects system that takes the Runequest combat system from good to the best there is. In Invincible, there is a whole list of them a bit like Mythras, but quite not as situational or exhaustive. The base stunts are very mechanically solid and there isn’t a lot of fluff here that players will never use. During the game there was a lot of double damage and stun used by players and enemies to try to bypass armor. No one had sharp weapons so the deadly strike special effect only accidentally came into play because I didn’t realize characters couldn’t use that without some sort of sharp weapon/power. That’s the only stunt I think is a little OP from the list.

There’s also the ability to come up with your own stunts based on the circumstances, which is critical to this type of game to move away completely from the tightly controlled (and very boring) combat of say 5th or 4th edition D&D. Yet it stays FAR away from the free-for-all story-driven nonsense of FATE or Masks, etc. where powers, effects and dice are all subservient to some player or GM description. Overall I feel like Stunts and how they are generated are a strong part of the game.

What is not in the Invincible game that is in FASERIP are Power Stunts. In FASERIP, Power Stunts are a way to increase your powers through risky, repeated non-standard use. For example, a hero with water-control based powers uses them to attack, but then decides to try a grapple with his water control as a power stunt. The character spends Karma and makes the roll, if it’s successful, the character gets to use their powers that way. Then they mark on their sheet that they have used a power like this and track it over time. If they do it 10 times, they GET that power effect permanently without a stunt. This is SLOW going but was a really interesting way to encourage players to use their powers in new and crazy ways. This is not in Invincible at all.

In Invincible, Karma is still in the game, but can’t be spent to help rolls, or do Power Stunts. It is experience and can be used to buy additional powers or effects on powers, but they aren’t tied to what the characters actually do in the game as much as in FASERIP. This was my only gripe so far with the system not being as open as FASERIP. Overall though, everything worked really well and I am looking forward to a LOT more content from Free League, especially that allows broadening out from just Invincible.

TLDR: If you like FASERIP, you will like Invincible.

Garycon 2026 – Musings!

It’s been three years since I’ve been at the best con there is: GARYCON. This con has three big things going for it (maybe more):

The Grand Geneva Resort. Intimate setting, cannot be a huge convention, drinks flowing constantly so you can get shitfaced from arrival to departure, every day of the Con. Food is plentiful and the restaurants and food service is really great. The staff will do stuff for you (like set up more tables in nooks and crannies). Tip them well and your random gaming table in the corner of some dark area will have a waiter the whole night. NO OTHER CON HAS ANYTHING LIKE THIS. It’s also very scenic.
RPG, OSR and bespoke game focus. I saw Star Frontiers, Top Secret, FASERIP, and the ORIGINAL version of BOOT HILL played as well as dozens of tables of AD&D. DCC is there in FORCE as well, Hackmaster, OSRIC, everything OSR. Why Lamentations of the Flame Princess doesn’t make a showing at this con I have no idea. Also tons of games from ye olden days that people made their own pimped out copies of: a huge Kingmaker board, massive wooden board for TSR’s Knights of Camelot, massive Dawn Patrol table. All of this is super awesome to see.
Cool little town nearby. Grand Geneva is across the expressway in a wilderness/farm region next to Lake Geneva, it’s technically within walking distance of the downtown BUT NOT IN MARCH. This has two positive effects, one, the town is far enough away that everyone stays at the Con for dinner and getting drunk AND if people want some night life outside of the Grand Geneva, there are tons of excellent bars and restaurants a short ride away. Being a town with the highest per-capita net worth in most, if not all, of the midwest helps as the quality of the places you can to is way higher than any town of this size. You can also stay in a hotel not far from the convention and get a bus/shuttle to the Grand Geneva to save money (even with record crowds at the con, there were still vacancies as March is between ski season and boating season so it’s a tourism dead zone).

Alright, here’s some shit I saw and played. I got to the con about 1PM Friday and just wandered around mostly as everyone else was in games or still working like chumps! The coolest thing I saw that day was the shrine to Dave Trampier with tons of his old stuff to look at, including original pages of Wormy, two hand drawn TITAN playtest boards, and lots of old artwork prints. I found a copy of Dragon #77 at the Noble Knight booth and added it to the collection there (has King of the Tabletop in it). I got a personal tour of the exhibit from Tramp’s sister and it was pretty eye opening. There were letters where he was trying to get people to fund a WORMY compendium, but it didn’t go through. That needs to happen someday, somehow. Friday night we went out to the steakhouse there and started heavily drinking and the night was over (most people had gotten there after work and were pretty beat down already before the booze).

Saturday I just had one game I had signed up for, the LEGO mech game, Mobile Frame Zero. There were a lot of kids there and the guy running it was a bit slow to start– by the time we got to the first turn’s activations, my buddy pinged me that there was a seat at the GIANT KINGMAKER TABLE and so I booked it over there to play that instead. That was great fun despite the fact that I had the weakest starting faction in the game and could only buddy up with people to do anything. The lady running it was the second generation ‘runner’ of this game and she did an amazing job of wrangling these cats.

I had to go to a funeral nearby that took a chunk of hours out of the con, but when I got back I got into a horror RPG called VAESEN. The scenario was investigating a string of crazy murders in Prague and we were nearly all killed, but pulled it off in the end (not going to put in any spoilers as I think this is a game module that others may play). It used a D6 attribute+skill system like Tenra Bansho Zero which was pretty good BUT for something like this I would still go for CoC with friends and INTO THE ODD at a convention. Last game of the day was going to be Warrior Knights (haha!) but it go to late so we played Shadow Moon Syndicate instead, which was fine but too much like Ethnos for my tastes.

All in all, a fantastic weekend that I really didn’t plan out enough, next year, if I can make it, I need to run an event or two.

13th Age 2nd Edition Kickstarter is live

My second longest ongoing campaign was 13th Age and it’s a goddamn fine system for high power D20 madness. I’m not sure it even needed a 2nd edition as the first was really on the $$$, but designers learn a lot when their designs are out being hammered by the real world and I no doubt that happened even with these seasoned designers (Heinsoo and Tweet). Yes you can make parties of muppets and the art is of the ‘generic fantasy’ extraordinaire (all very 3E style as it has the same artists), but despite this, 13th Age has it where it counts for both player TOYS for their character classes and it is extremely easy to GM compared to ALL other D20 RPG’s in this mechanical weight class. I can’t recommend it enough, though it does not have anywhere near the adventure support of DCC or Pathfinder.

Preview HERE.

Kickstarter HERE.

This is what it’s ALL about:

Unicorn Overlord – first GOTY candidate for 2024? Yeah.

Vanillaware are naughty, naughty sumkas to be sure, with their cute but sexy Odin’s Sphere leading into their side scrolling answer to Diablo, Dragon’s Crown, with the largest breasts on record for a playable character. You’d think a studio so obsessed with giant barbarian woman’s thighs wouldn’t be able to crank out such good games time and time again, but they certainly have in the past and have done it again!

Before I gush all over Unicorn Overlord, I would be remiss if I did not mention that I did not like Vanillaware’s last game, 13 Sentinels, and wished I had never bought it. The story was Soul Nomad and The World Eaters level confusing with the difference being that the story parts completely got in the way of the combat. The early game the sequences where you run around as various characters in frustrating side-scrolling puzzles were so long and arduous as to negate the fun of the tactical mech combat once you eventually got to it, and even then, it was far to short in the mech, and way to long out of it. Even my kids that tend to like those sorts of games on the Switch just won’t bother with 13 Sentinels. Luckily, that is the past as we now have a game from Vanillaware that does the exact opposite: has a story and it gets the fuck out of the way for the joy of the tactical combat!

Unicorn Overlord, for those that may have never heard about it yet, is a modern Ogre Battle, which means it is an RPG with tons of different characters that are organized into battle units. Each of these units ends up having different capabilities in tactical as well as strategic contexts. Characters level up and have light item management (nothing like Dragon’s Crown/ Diablo though) and also grow affinity with their different combat groups over time. Choosing the right battle group for the right job at the right time is critical to success and building out those ‘right’ battle groups is half the fun of the game, the other half is the slaughter parts.

There are so many games around to put time into, why play this over other games? First, it’s absolutely gorgeous. For a tactical battle game, the art, character design and animation is over the top. Player’s have an option to skip battle animations but I almost NEVER do, just to see my plucky characters in all their animated glory.

Second, the core gameplay loop is done extremely well. You unlock new characters during the story and can combine them with existing units, form new ones and then try them out vs enemies or in practice. The strategic aspects of positioning, blocking, the action point economy and special leader/member powers on the strategic map is all just superbly done. As a fan of Ogre Battle/Soul Nomad and the World Eaters style games, I’m going to hazard to say that this is probably already my favorite in the genre.

Lastly: Tits. Everyone loves them. Every man, woman and child on earth. Vanillaware knows this.

Negatives, and there are a few, consist of a bit of chaos and confusion during the real-time strategic portion of the game, where, especially on the Switch, it can be hard to see what unit is next to another unit. I did get into a forever loop situation where two units, both out of action points, were constantly going to fight each other and neither could harm on another. One unit was up against the side of the map so the loser could not be pushed back. Lastly, while this is minor, the main character and his best friend are the most GENERIC anime fantasy characters imaginable, which is odd since Vanillaware typically has such cool designs for the main characters in other games.

While I haven’t finished the game yet (it’s long), I already highly recommend the game to everyone that likes this style at all.

Tactical view of a battle

Some basic tips

Do not line characters up in a row where possible, they will get hit by attacks that effect everything in the row, and your soft-bosom’d witches will get dropped in one shot, and we can’t have that!
Use the 20th level horse guy to help level up your weak dudes. He pounds ass early game– use him.
Restoration deliveries to harbors allow access to islands that have neat stuff on them.
Do not rest if you can help it on the strategic map. Units can defend with 1 Action Point FOREVER, so you can just sit there and get attacked all you want. If your unit is in a resting state when attacked it’s fucked.
Do not set the difficulty to Normal. Go to Tactical at least.

This is only out on consoles (Switch/PS5) and not the PC. Looking for something like this on the PC? Check out Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga.

Onyx Path fixes Stunting in the Storyteller System!

I just finished reading the new Onyx Path Trinity Core rules and it looks like they fixed Stunts, albeit too late for Exalted 3.

Years ago I did a post about the really bad design of STUNTS in Exalted 2nd Edition, that was not improved by Exalted 3rd. This wasn’t a review of Exalted 3 as a whole, just a note that the way stunts were designed were a huge problem as it puts the onus on the player to come up with something cool, that may not happened due to the dice being rolled AFTER the description. In 2nd edition, stunts were tied to Mote-regeneration (the stuff that let’s you use your powers) and that turned out to be a very bad idea*. White Wolf was never known for their playtesting ability…

Feng Shui 2’s solution to stunts was the simple and best one– roll the dice, see what happens and if you roll high enough in the situation, then you get a stunt. In Mythras, the opposed combat rolls determine levels of success, which may allow special effects (which are fucking brutal). Lastly, the 13th Age Rogue has a power that gives them one stunt per battle, that ALWAYS happens regardless of the roll of the dice. I like this, but that’s probably because I play using a rogue in 13th Age!

The way it works in the new Trinity/AEON/Aberrant is you make a roll vs a difficulty and then spend your successes to overcome the difficulty first, next spend any excess for effects of your attack. Doing damage to your opponent is considered an effect, for example, as well as tripping, blinding, added dice for your next attack, disarming: all of it are purchased with successes– successes realized and explained AFTER the roll. So if you even up successes vs difficulty, you effectively succeeded, but you don’t have any additional successes for that success to have an effect.

What this avoids are players mulling over more than just their attack moves, but an over-blown description of their attack moves before the dice hit the table to show that it happened. You can declare a ‘medium attack to no specific location’ the same as D&D, but if the dice come up GREAT for you, that medium attack can become a dry gulch to the throat, disarm and knee to the nuts!

Added to this is the ability for characters to do multiple actions during their turn up to their Cunning stat– so punching a mook, grabbing his gun and shooting the kneecaps off a couple of other mooks is entirely possible. With the scaling rules, a character with a 3+ scale difference in skill vs his opponents simply DICTATES what occurs during their combat action. Love it.

I’m not super interested in Aeon (the sci fi game), but let’s see if Onyx Path can pull off D10 superheroes with Aberrant! There are a million superhero games out now, and most of them don’t even compare well to FASERIP, especially all of them made during the “RPG microlite” or FATE years that hand wave all powers into some generic die roll.

While this will likely be missing the hard-edge 90’s conspiracy and nihilism we’ve come to love from White Wolf, after reading the Trinity Core Rules, I bet system wise, it’s a winner.

*for the record: Excellency + Shadow over Water [or Seven Shadow Evasion] + Reflex Sidestep Technique + Leaping Dodge Method. This combo costs 10 XP to purchase, is friendly with Infinite Mastery, allows the character to perfectly defend against any attack, allows the nullification of unexpected attacks and allows the character to break most flurries. Invoke this combo for every single action in combat, using a 2-die stunt to restore the expended Willpower. Thank you Jon Chung: why were you not on the Exalted 3 playtesting team?

13th Age MINARIA Campaign!

You read that right, 13th Age in Minaria— the campaign setting from TSR that never was, and could have been.

For the non old-person, Minaria is the fantasy world created for the Divine Right board game, which many of us had as kids in the 80’s. While the game was a bit labyrinthian for a 9-12 year-old as a hex and counter, the map board was on the wall of my bedroom for at least 15 years. The map and counter art is by Dave Trampier, and is amazing. The Tower of Zards, Invisible School of Thaumaturgy and all the awesome mercenary units (like Hamhara the dragon) were incredibly fertile ground for the imagination as a young and now older mainge.

The mystery is why this was not turned into a Greyhawk style campaign setting by TSR as all the assets were right there– just needed someone to start writing modules for it! There were multiple articles in Dragon Magazine on Minaria and it’s environs. Anyway, time to redress this issue!

13th Age and Minaria are a great combo as the 13th Age world itself is godless and pretty generic fantasy, especially since it has no gods which I’ve always found very strange. While Runequest has a bit too much to do with the gods for me, the 13th Age world just doesn’t seem grounded. The Icons in 13th Age are really just basic concepts and with Minaria, there are oodles of Icons that are far more interesting and engaging than the stock 13th Age ones. Yet on the plus side, you have the amazing 13th Age system, which is probably my most run RPG in the last 5 years or so. While Minaria is not explicitly high fantasy, it has enough of those elements to fit well with the more gonzo fantasy of 13th Age. Minaria and Divine Right are still products of the Gonzo TSR age.

I’m not GMing this one, which is a great break from almost always GMing and I get to play a rogue, so far my favorite class for the game (among many awesome class selections). The fun part about the rogue is that you can bounce around the combat area almost at will, you rarely get stuck, and you can hammer enemies.

I’ve only been in two sessions with the group so far and we are in some rather familiar house by the sea near Port Lork at the moment… and we’ll see where this goes.

Gencon bound tomorrow!

Here we go for another fucking Gencon. When oh when will I learn? The overpriced everything, the MASSIVE crowds (and I mean that on every level) and the constant hunt for the awesome thing– when really this year I would be fine staying at home with a bunch of friends and playing a whole lotta ROOT instead.

That said, I’ll be able to see some homies from across the lands (not as many this year are going), and play some stuff that I wouldn’t ever have a chance to, so that’s good. I think until our kids are old enough, gone are the days where a whole shitload of us would ditch the kids for the weekend and go down for all four days. It may be better to go back to what I used to do: drive down Friday, stay saturday and leave Sunday. Ahhhh well, in a moment of weakness and Maat’s prompting, I’m in it for all four days.

Events! I’m in what should be a very cool FASERIP miniatures Free For All battle. I’ll post impressions and the rules and all that shit when I get back from the con. Second I got into the Keyforge tournament, which should be ridiculous. RPG-wise we are in a Mutant Crawl Classics game and a game of Mythras on Saturday morning at 8 AM (let’s see if we make this one).

Most importantly though is the self run SHADOWFIST DRAFT! I got together all my remaining boxes of Shadowfist and we have a few people ready to draft and play. It’s going to be a real shit swarm of decks as we are starting with:

Standard Starter – Absolute DRECK of cards, the lowest of the low. When I look at this stuff, I’m shocked that Shadowfist survived after it’s first Limited run…so much garbage.

Boosters of the following:

Standard Booster – More of the same crap and still no hitters to find…
Empire of Evil – everyone will be hoping for the best with their booster here
Netherworld 2 – good stuff, just need to get lucky
Throne War – great set, but pretty big… so chances are slim
Boom Shaka Laka – in for the LOL’S. Maybe someone will get a good dragon card or…?

This should be enough to get a semi functional deck out of and we have pods of feng shui and foundations. Should be a great time, if we can only get a couple 3-man tables anyway.

So see you after with pics and other nonsense. Luckily I can’t spend much money on anything, so there won’t be the horde of crap I come back with this year. Hoping to find a decently priced John Company, Conquest of Paradise or Fire in the Lake, but that’s it.

Fav RPG books of 2018

Anyway these are not necessarily from 2018, but just books that I took a fancy to throughout the year.

Shinobigami Modern Ninja Battle Game

I finally got the final PDF of the rules and printed them up and have read them cover to cover. If you like Hillfolk or Fiasco, you can see where they got all their inspiration for those games from (this and Tenra Bansho Zero). Looking forward to running this. I have not played this yet, so I can’t truly review the game itself.

Down Darker Trails

While this uses an inferior D100 system to Mythras, Down Darker Trails is an incredible supplement to CoC for the old West. It’s extremely thorough in it’s descriptions of the era and nature of roleplaying in the old west with monsters without getting totally overboard like Deadlands (which is cool too). The adventures in the back of the book aren’t too great, but it would be easy to wing something with this source material. With the rate at which I’m able to run games, this may never get played, but it’s a great read.

Runequest Glorantha/Guide to Glorantha

These are excellent RQ books, especially the Guide to Glorantha which finally laid out to me what the heck is going on. While RQ requires a lot of player knowledge of the setting, it’s much easier to have it all consolidated in a couple of books than all over the place. No matter what system you may choose to run RQ with, the Guide to Glorantha is a must read.

For play in 2018 year, we continued the Lamentations of the Flame Princess campaign, but some of the players got sick of the non-levelling up and general low power level of the game (with silver=experience, it can be rough to level up), so we are going to switch to Mythras after the current campaign arc is done.

My favorite game from 2018 is probably DCC, we’ve had a lot of fun with friends and the kids with the game and adventures. My favorite RPG event of last year was the 2 day 13th Age level 1-6 switching GM’s every 3 hours.

Nostalgia for the OSR

Since Google+ and the OSR movement are going away in a year after G+ closes down, there’s a lot of pre-shutdown nostalgia already for the OSR, though the movement will go on for another year (until the day G+ shuts down for good, then it will be gone outside of Garycon and Gamehole con).

The questionnaire below was posted as a nostalgia piece that bloggers can fill out to have some feels together now at the end and for the posterity of the movement. The OSR had a good run, and G+ was entertaining to say the least.

In terms of content that the OSR produced, there were some good adventures but I think 90% of the ‘hacks’ people put together were in some issue of Dragon magazine from 1978 – 1985 but people were just too lazy to find them and tell the people that what they were suggesting had already been done before.

OSR Guide For The Perplexed Questionnaire

1. One article or blog entry that exemplifies the best of the Old School Renaissance for me:

Zak S. and RPGPundit, a comparison of the D&D 5th Edition consultants, or “John Tarnowski must feel lower than a legless flea’s taint”

My favorite piece of OSR wisdom/advice/snark:

All of the LotFP Grindhouse GM’s book.

Best OSR module/supplement:

Prince Charming, Reanimator

My favorite house rule (by someone else):

Advantage / Disadvantage from 5E

How I found out about the OSR:

LotFP stuff sitting on the shelf in the game store… I think.

My favorite OSR online resource/toy:

Into the Odd Character generator

Best place to talk to other OSR gamers:

GaryCon

Other places I might be found hanging out talking games:

Gamehole Con
In person with friends.

My awesome, pithy OSR take nobody appreciates enough:

Endless Trash.

My favorite non-OSR RPG:

FENG SHUI 2!

Why I like OSR stuff:

Dungeon Crawl Classics and especially the LotFP stuff by Raphael Chandler

I like Tenkar’s hounding of that pencil dice guy.

Two other cool OSR things you should know about that I haven’t named yet:

Venger Satanis. Runequest 6.

If I could read but one other RPG blog but my own it would be:

Design Mechanism’s blog

A game thing I made that I like quite a lot is:

A lotfp pocket mod character sheet. A funnel for DCC. A monster for lotFP that was never published.

I’m currently running/playing:

Lotfp, DCC, 13th Age, Mythras

I don’t care whether you use ascending or descending AC because:

You’re trying to find players to play Dungeon World at Game Universe.

The OSRest picture I could post on short notice:

And another couple kickstarters…

Brutal! Too many….

First one I can’t vouch for as a game, but it LOOKS good. (Remember Dungeon Degenerates? that was well worth the kickstarter price based on the art alone, and was a solid game to boot!). DEUS LO VULT.

this one is around 50$ shipped so it’s not a bankbreaker like the CMON ones…

The second one is a no brainer. Steve Jackson got the license back for “The Fantasy Trip” after many years as an out of print microgame and started a kickstarter to bring it back into print. 30$.

Remember these in the hobby shops back in the day? This is it.