There and Back Again: My Circular Role-playing Journey

I’ve talked about my personal history with the ‘Old School Renaissance’ or ‘Old School Revival’ (OSR) in the past at this blog (e.g., see this post from 2022). But some reflection on the games that I’ve been playing in recent years has prompted me to scribble some further thoughts. (My apologies for being a bit self-indulgent here …)

[Saruman by Angus McBride]

It’s been an interesting journey. I was ‘floating around’ at various role-playing games fora during the early days of the OSR over two decades ago. Disappointment with 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons – and nostalgia for my early days of gaming – led me to dig out (and in some cases repurchase) my old Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Basic/Expert Dungeons & Dragons, Rules Cyclopaedia D&D, and other out-of-print RPG books. I was excited – and later disappointed – by Castles & Crusades in its early days. (I wrote positive reviews at RPG.net of both the C&C box set and Players’ Handbook, but eventually came to find the atrocious editing by Troll Lord Games intolerable.)  

I started this blog in 2009 in order to post some rules ideas for Swords & Wizardry (S&W). Some of my ‘swords and sorcery’ house rules for S&W appeared in early issues of Fight On! and Knockspell. Eventually, many of those rules were incorporated into Crypts and Things. So I guess that I contributed – albeit in a small way – to the creation of OSR “stuff,” at least early on. 

But I haven’t really been that engaged with the OSR for about a decade now. I still follow it to some extent. I mean, I have Dolmenwood and Shadowdark, as well as the more recent versions of S&W, and a few other things. I’ve backed the forthcoming ‘3rd edition’ of OSRIC (the original “retro-clone,” in this case of 1980 AD&D). While I regret some of my purchases, overall I find that there are still interesting things being produced. But I don’t really use any OSR (by which I mean here ‘TSR D&D-derived’) systems anymore, and haven’t for years. They just don’t appeal to me that much these days. I think that, given my tastes, there are superior alternatives available. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by this. I sort of thought the same thing about AD&D/D&D around 1985.

Almost all my gaming these days involve either Mythras or Against the Darkmaster (but sometimes my groups will play ‘one shots’ of other things, e.g., Mothership or Delta Green, and I’d like to run some Dragonbane someday). I find these systems more satisfying overall than any version of D&D (TSR, OSR, 3e, 5e, whatever). I guess I’m not a ‘rules lite’ person after all. In retrospect, I think that I thought that about myself only because I found running 3e D&D to be such a tedious chore. 

Of course, both Mythras and Against the Darkmaster are descendants of other ‘old school’ systems: Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying (Runequest, Stormbringer, and the like) in the case of Mythras, and Iron Crown Enterprise’s Middle-earth Roleplaying (itself a simplified version of 2nd edition Rolemaster), in the case of Against the Darkmaster. So, I guess they're kind of ‘OSR’ systems as well (but not if we adhere to the “OSR = derived from TSR AD&D/D&D” definition). 

I can’t help but be struck by the extent to which my personal gaming history has repeated itself: dissatisfaction with AD&D/D&D led me to move to Middle-earth Roleplaying (MERP) and Basic Roleplaying (BRP), including Call of Cthulhu, Hawkmoon, and Stormbringer, in the mid-late 1980s. And about three decades later the same thing happened with OSR D&D and 5e D&D. Hopefully I've learned my lesson and won’t go through this cycle again.

As an aside, one thing that makes me think of the old MERP campaign modules as "old school" in nature is that – whatever their other faults – they were effectively “sandboxes” (as I explain here). They described a number of locations, some in detail, and provided advice for GMs on how to provide "hooks" for players. There were a few “adventure modules” for MERP – books with 3 adventures (usually aimed at levels, 1, 3, and 5) – but even those were pretty loose for the most part (generally they provided a setting and a situation), not “railroad” adventures. So, after my first several years with AD&D, a lot of my GMing involved using and running Middle-earth “sandbox” campaigns, although of course that term was not used in those days (at least to my knowledge). Indeed, I vividly recall comparing my MERP modules to TSR's Dragonlance series around 1986 or 1987, and noting how little room for improvisation or player freedom the latter allowed.

Anyhow, to the extent I was still involved in the hobby during the 1990s, the games I followed were those that came out earlier, especially MERP and Stormbringer (the latter revised and renamed Elric! during that decade). I remember visiting gaming stores in the 1990s and being a bit baffled and even put off by all the “goth” stuff. I never got into Vampire and the like (just as I never got into the Magic craze.) When D&D 3e came out, I was excited by it because it seemed to “improve” D&D by including certain things from other systems that I liked (e.g., skills). In play, though, I came to loathe the system after two year-long campaigns, and so was primed for the OSR when it happened.

Of course, had I been sensible, I would’ve just kept playing MERP, Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer, and similar older games – and just ignored the hype around 3e D&D and the “d20” universe in the early 2000s. These days, for the most part, I’m happy to stick with my “d100” games, Mythras and Against the Darkmaster. Wisdom, I hope, comes with age.