Uncaring Cosmos

There’s a really wonderful discussion taking place on the RPG PUB forum about my earlier post. Lots of great input, with people sharing memories of gaming in Britain (and Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere) back in the day.

There was some gentle pushback against the term “B-OSR”. It was never really intended seriously, so I’m not overly attached to it. I chose it, with tongue in cheek, because it implies Britain is in some sense in second place (the “B-OSR” to America’s “A-OSR”) and, despite the current trend towards jingoistic boosterism, people in the UK have a long tradition of thinking their country is a bit shit. Still, if you prefer, “British old-school” works just as well (and it can be considered a vibe or aesthetic rather than a revival).

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I’ve bashed together a simple B-OSR blogroll for the Uncaring Cosmos sidebar. It’s a work in progress and not supposed to be definitive. If you can think of additions, let me know in the comments below or via my contact page.

I’ve already had a couple of comments asking how I define the British old-school. The simple answer is that I’m not really interested in a strict definition; I think the B-OSR is / should be a really loose, flexible thing. I do think the term “British old-school” or B-OSR is a useful one, because I reckon British tabletop gamers have slightly different cultural points of reference than our cousins from other countries, and I’m interested in exploring that.

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I’ve put together a character sheet for the Delta Green tabletop RPG, designed for use in online Google Hangouts games. It should also print nicely for offline play (remember to turn off grid lines in the print settings, and to set the margins to narrow).

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I’ve been running a weekly OSR D&D game for three years now. It’s morphed into a sandbox-y science fantasy thing with dinosaurs (as you do), with five regular players. We’re wrapping up the current campaign (and one of my players is off to Scotland), so I’ve already started planning the next game. I’ll try to publish a record of the new campaign here (yeah, right!).

I’m thinking I want to run something from the British old-school next. I’ll probably use Dragon Warriors as the basic system (because it’s so close to B/X, meaning I can port in OSR content relatively easily), hacking in bits of Advanced Fighting Fantasy, Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play 1e, Maelstrom, and even the old 1979 game Heroes.

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