A Quick Blog About The Joys of Item-based Character Advancement

A friend of mine was telling me recently that a player in his Conan RPG wanted to switch to D&D or PF because he felt like Conan didn't "give [him] enough freedom for [his] character." This was confusing to me and my friend - from what I've been told by that friend, the most recent Conan RPG is very much one of the modern 4-stat, stats are dice that you can buy up to bigger dice kind of freeform games that's a little crunchier than The Electrum Archive and a little less crunchy than, yknow, 5e/PF. When pressed, he clarified that he meant that he didn't know how to make his character "good" because there was no clear path to make his character do more damage in combat. When he was told that this was giving him less freedom to express his character as he wanted, he didn't seem to understand.

I don't fault this guy for this opinion. I've stated before that I started playing TTRPGs on D&D 3.5 and was DEEP in the CharOp build buildcrafting mines, like I understand wanting to do that - but the fact that someone viewed that as MORE freedom rather than less surprised me. More likely than not, this is just a good old fashioned neurodivergent quibbling about word meanings - his "freedom" might be what I think of as "parameters," and that's fine. My years of hanging out with the chiptune community have reinforced the idea that constraints breed creativity. But then I got to thinking about games that just don't do character progression that way - no levels, no classes, no skills, just the stuff you find and the way the world reacts to what you do in it. Cairn does this, of course - as do most descendents of Into The Odd. When I brought this up to my friend, who's a longtime AD&D fan but didn't really do much with OD&D, he was curious as to how that would even work in a longterm game: in his mind, if everyone had access to the same pool of items then there's no way to make the characters feel meaningfully different from one another; and while diegetic rewards like land or titles or retainers or an airship might be cool, if not everyone is bought in on the world of the game then there's not a lot for them to engage with. 

My first response was "I hear you, and I want to talk about this but actually Gamefacecon is this weekend so I'm just gonna go take you to meet Yochai and Amanda P and the other non-Cairn OSR folks and I'll just ask them to explain it better than I ever could," because boy howdy do I love taking people directly to the source to get their information. And to be fair, I did also explain a little - about how the kind of items you bring with your can inform your play style and how you interact with the world, and what you prioritize keeping with you determines what kind of character you're really playing without those pesky labels. 

But I did earnestly engage with this - because I feel like there has to be some kind of happy medium between the "hee hee, make number go up" crowd and the "I have fun by chucking weird little freaks into the meatgrinder" crowd, and I think the happy medium is The Wildsea! Whereas Into The Odd et. al. have your single Background/Failed Profession/Whatever, The Wildsea has you build someone out of multiple archetypes. Likewise, where the Oddlikes have you with a limited inventory and a small pool of health which when combined dictate how effective and survivable your character is, The Wildsea literally combines all of this with all of your defining character traits (which includes iconic items) having HP boxes associated with them, and when you take damage you tick boxes on your items and traits - which means that taking damage may mean you lose access to vital abilities until you heal rather than the "only the last hit point matters" mindset in most games. You don't have to worry if everyone is bought in on the game world or not because YOU DON'T HAVE A CHOICE, YOU'VE GOTTA CHIP IN AND BUILD THAT BOAT, and otherwise anything that shows up that might be a reward or quest for your characters is going to be very directly shaped by active choices the players are making. It remains just tactical enough that CharOp gremlins can have fun getting their greebly little hands all over everything while not making any one build more or less "viable" than another, meaning that you cannot make "bad" choices (a thing I find plagues all games descended from D&D).

Anyway, this is just a bit of a ramble to pass the time until we can skedaddle up to Baltimore for Gamefacecon, but if there's anything to take away from this it's that you should always do root cause analysis on your players' opinions (and your own, for that matter) because you can't trust that everyone is self-aware enough to be able to accurately articulate their own preferences. 

Testing System Neutrality: or, Outcast Lodestone Raiders: Vastmarches

 

    As someone with ADHD, somewhat limited impulse control, the desire to support creators I like and years of regret from missing purchasing books when I was young only to find them to be absurdly beyond my means now, I am unfortunately the perfect mark for interesting TTRPG projects. I've been running Charlie Ferguson-Avery's Ave Nox for several months now to fair-to-moderate success with my home group using The Electrum Archive as the base game. Tonally, they're not completely mismatched - there's probably something to be said about doing a full system conversion to smooth over the weird patches when it comes to lore, but honestly there's enough overlap with the lore and setting of each that any inconsistencies are usually pretty easy to either say "Eh, maybe this doesn't exist in our game" or else go "Yeah, it's weird there's all these kind of conflicting overlapping things, let's just pick one and stick with it." There's some times where the overlapping mechanics make for a deeper story - for example, combining the encounter rules for both base game and module means that I can do things like say "Well, this says you don't get an encounter, but the other roll says you do, so I'm going to say that this puts you in an advantageous situation/the encounter is non-hostile" or so on. I love an expanded matrix of situations, and it ramps up the tension at the table which is always fun. 

    

    Taking all that into account, I recently saw that Charlie had restocked The Vast in the Dark: Expanded and was glad I'd not given into the urge to try to find a copy whilst it was out of stock. As someone who's been rotating the final form of a depth crawl for a project now like two years over the deadline, I'd been meaning to grab VitD:E as a way to finish crystalizing my own concepts after reading through Emmy Allen's The Gardens of Ynn and The Stygian Library and ending a particularly heartbreaking Mothership campaign by playing through Gradient Descent, so luck was upon me. So I grabbed a copy, read it, and I thought it was pretty good (and also very much obviously written during the Covid-19 pandemic because holy shit is that bleak, but also like yeah man I get it). I realized I'd never really get a good feel for it in practice unless I found a way to play through it, and while I could wait until my home group wraps up Ave Nox, I figured this was as good a time as any to bust out another game I'd purchased that I'd seen very little about online aside from its award win - Outcast Silver Raiders.

IN THE GRIM DARKNESS 

OF THE GRIM DARKNESS 

THERE IS ONLY GRIM DARKNESS

    Much like my previous pairing, both games have a lot of surface level thematic and mechanical overlaps - both present a fairly grim setting: O.S.R. being set in a fantastical Pseudo-Scotland circa 1200 CE and otherwise being a setting where magic is rare and horrifying, the people you meet on the road are just as likely to mess up your day as the frankly despicable beasts and demons that lurk in the dark places of the world, and with a general impetus towards collecting and securing treasure as the main method characters have to level up; with VitD:E, the beasts you find may be slightly more unhinged and horrifying (but just as harvestable for goods, if you're not squeamish), the land may be less hospitable, and the ominous lodestone pillars rising out of the infinite blackened desert sands probably aren't great but, y'know, it's only marginally worse. In that way, it's not unlike the criminally underappreciated Wristcutters: A Love Story: you were somewhere your life sucked, and now you're somewhere where your life sucks in a new, more interesting way but with the knowledge that there is no exit. Mechanically, there's other ways they overlap: both assume you're doing a hexcrawl and have roughly the same traversal mechanics, both assume you're likely to run into bands of freaks and weirdoes or weird weather when out exploring, they just have...shall we say, different freaks and different weather patterns. There's the same assumption of stats, 90% of the mechanics and statblocks are directly translatable as long as you're fluent in B/X-ese.

    Really, the only places where there's any sort of chafing or misalignment mechanically is where VitD:E has explicitly set out to simplify or reframe mechanics: there's the inventory system (both use a slot-based inventory but go about determining your loadout a little differently), HP is swapped for GRIT and FLESH which can make Warriors stand out a little less when it comes to how durable they are, and there's the general overland traversal mechanics which have been lightly besmoothened (and also that there aren't really beasts of burden in The Vast, what with it being a liminal nightmare voidrealm and all - hard to imagine a horse finding its way here even if they are beings possessed of pure evil by their very nature). There is one very important Lore Problem here, though - the world of O.S.R. supposes that the things that power magic are literal demons from literal Hell. Does that mean that magic in The Vast is now powered by the horrible things that live there instead? Does that mean triggering the mishap table in a way that might normally cause demons to come out or open a portal directly TO Hell might need to have some other kind of effect? Maybe! We can burn cross that bridge when we come to it.

Who's We, Anyway?

    There's a very high chance if you're interacting with this blog you know exactly who "we" is: there exists a secret army of bloggers that stalk the prismatic wastes, all marching under the banner of the birdman himself. Seriously though, the Prismatic Wasteland Discord is full of very smart TTRPG bloggers and/or creators. It turns out the Venn diagram of folks who are interested in trying out games but have very little time to commit to regular campaigns and folks who like to blog about games is damn near a circle, and Luke (of Murkdice) was actually the one who pointed out that both games had really good synergy to me in the first place when I brought up VitD:E in a conversation about hexcrawls and traversal procedures, so I figured this group would be a good place to start. My hope is that if it turns out that this goes pretty well and the random content creation features are pretty smooth at-table, I can actually go true West Marches with this and just open it up to whoever wants to take a trip to this extremely dismal setting to see what secrets they can find whenever I've got free time to guide them there. 

    Does that sound fun to you? Hit me up.

Isn't This Vastly Changing The Baseline Idea Behind O.S.R., Pun Intended?

    So, yeah, kinda. I do genuinely want to play O.S.R. straight some day. I've read through most of all three of the books at this point and there's some real juice to be besquozen from that fruit, and I don't even have the zines that go with it yet. I've also got Strang Beorn which is a much more thematically synergistic adventure I could play through, assuming I didn't want to use one of the many excellent sample adventures or the remarkably well-keyed hexcrawl in the book itself. However - if I'm perfectly honest, just like my time with HELLWHALERS, I worry that my vaguely Jewish upbringing has prevented me from really being able to connect with settings that are overtly Christian (which is very much a large pillar of the baseline setting of O.S.R.). However, as a queer person who actively chose an English degree at an art college and as someone who just lived trough a global pandemic, I know I can connect with a setting high on extreme bleakness, depression, isolation, the loss of self, the perversion of the flesh, and an appreciation for brutalist architecture - and so, here we are. I'll tell you all how it goes.

Stay weird out there.

PS: I don't have any affiliate links or anything, you don't have to worry about any of those links being bait for you to click on for me to try to get a buck - I really did get an English degree and just love a well-cited paper, but I'll be damned if I'm going to sit here doing an annotated bibliography on a blog in the time of hypertext media, thank you very much.