Righto, the new British Old-School campaign is coming together. Last night, ahead of a rather boozy Delta Green game, I pitched the campaign to my players and, I’m happy to report, it was received with enthusiasm. The basic idea is a kind of sword & sorcery “Pratchettesque pirates” setup that I’m tentatively calling Blacksand Nights.

Basically, the game will be a medieval pirate sandbox, with players taking on the role of budding freebooters. They won’t start with pirate ships, however, and will probably have to loot Firetop Mountain (or win the Deathtrap Dungeon prize money) to afford their first cog. The system will be a modified version of the Dragon Warriors RPG. The setting will be Titan from the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks (specifically Northern Allansia, Port Blacksand and environs).

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How’s this for a deep cut? Does anyone remember the Last Legionary books by Canadian sci-fi author Douglas Hill? Because I don’t. Or, at least, I didn’t until last night.

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Luther left me a comment under my last post asking if I planned to publish play reports from my upcoming British Old-School campaign. He’s interested in seeing how B-OSR games differ from A-OSR games in practice.

The answer is: yes, I’d love to. I don’t want to bore people with lengthy sagas [Then how about you stop writing here, eh? – Ed.], but a couple of brief write-ups might be acceptable.

However, it got me thinking. How would a B-OSR game feel different from an A-OSR game?

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I’ve made a character sheet for Dragon Warriors. You can get a copy here (though you’ll need a Google account to access it). It’s not my finest work, but it will get the job done.

I’ve decided to use the Dragon Warriors RPG by Dave Morris and Oliver Johnson as system of choice for my upcoming “British Old-School” campaign. After reading it through again, it really is about as close to B/X D&D as any British RPG published in the 1970s or ’80s ever came. Hopefully I can put together some Basic D&D / Dragon Warriors conversion notes at some point so that OSR content can be ported in relatively easily.

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For me, gaming is not necessarily a distraction from life’s “important stuff”. Jonathan Jones, the Guardian’s art critic, once wrote an infamous (and lazy) hit piece on the Discworld novels not long after Terry Pratchett’s death. To be fair to Jones, he later held it up as his “most shameful moment as a critic”. Nevertheless, he clearly draws a distinction between “entertainment” and “art”, and believes life is “too short to waste” on ordinary entertainment (particularly the “graveyard for the English language” that is the fantasy genre).

Mssr. Jones thinks we should be spending our precious time reading “art”, by which he means novels of the sort Philip Roth wrote. Michael Moorcock once said of novels of the sort Philip Roth wrote that they are “usually blokes writing about being a bloke, and quite frankly I can’t think of anything more boring… It’s the modern novel’s final fling, the ‘bloke novel’… All the various versions of the right of passage.”

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