Gelatinous Cubed

How I Got Hooked On Old School

Or, how OSR got me back into improv and puzzle solving by Gelatinous Cubed

I've been playing tabletop games since I was nine, starting with Dungeons & Dragons 3.5, and later moving on to the 5th Edition of that game. They were always fun and entertaining, more so because of the people than anything about the games. In fact, quite a few of the games I played were notoriously crunchy, bloated with complex and incredibly specific rules that served little purpose in terms of usability. So I started looking up different games that weren't Dungeons & Dragons. I played Risus and found that I enjoyed the freestyle nature, but I wanted something a little less "treat everything like combat".

My Uncle introduced me to D&D conventions when I was ten. It was an experience. I had fun playing my stereotypical halfling bard, charming people and singing songs and trying to solve problems without violence because any sort of bloodshed would probably kill me. But the official Adventurer's League games that were run at the conventions were very formulaic, and honestly kind of boring.Most puzzles were either at a video game level of simplicity (put the blue flame in the blue bowl kind of stuff) or asked for a single specific solution and nothing else. Every adventure had at least one combat, and combat was a boring slog of hitting other people's numbers until someone died. My enthusiasm for such games slowly waned, and my desire for freedom grew.

That was when I found OSR. Or maybe OSR found me. A friend in early highschool introduced me to this game called Mothership. Maybe you've heard about it. The game was dark and full of survival-horror aspects and puzzle solving and critical thinking and for the first time, I watched characters die. Not a lot of them, and most of them died in dumb ways. Stepping on a landmine. Trying to gun down someone in power armor. Dumb ways, yes, but ways that they shouldn't have tried in the first place. During those games, I realized OSR was the style of gaming for me.

I looked through a few other sources. Blogs, OD&D hacks, ramblings on old abandoned websites on the edge of the internet. I found all sorts of creative, terrifying, and completely amazing ideas. I didn't find too many complete systems or frameworks, because there is no single way to make OSR. There is no single entity that is OSR. OSR is an ever-growing Appendix O that we add to and take inspiration from to fuel our creative ventures. I loved it, and I still love it. And I wanted to be a part of that.