Letters Day

I haven't had one of these in a while.
But today we have a couple of letters for your viewing pleasure. The first is from Doug M., who writes:

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Re. Green Devil Face
I would agree that the self-referential stuff and the inside jokes are stupid at best, actively obnoxious at worst.  But those are pretty minor points.  What's creepy about this is the vibe of fiftyish guys trying to recapture the experience of their high school senior year circa 1978 -- Billy Joel and Abba on Dad's Hi-Fi, the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant under the six-pack of Tab, and the Keep on the Borderlands spread out on the basement ping-pong table.  Wow, look at these weird dice!

But as to OSR, I'm sincerely confused.  If "OSR" is limited to people who want to use 1st Ed rules to play Tomb of Horrors again, then yeah, it's a pretty teeny tiny group.  (Thank goodness.)  If it's people trying to recapture the wacky, anything-goes flavor of tabletop RPGs' first decade, that's something else again.

Is playing Pathfinder Old School?  (Serious question.)  It seems... at least somewhat so.  Pathfinder is really 3.75, no?  And the "look and feel" is very much 3.x, which in turn was a callback to AD&D circa 1982.

If Pathfinder doesn't qualify, would Hackmaster?  I mean, it's the old AD&D books with a lot of house rules.  Of course, it's out of print now.  But still.

Is there a consensus on this point?
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Well Doug, as much as it may surprise you, yes, the consensus is to use only old-games for old-school play, or "clone games" which either directly copy an old game, or copy with some modifications. New games, of any kind, with or without old-school feel, are not welcome by most of the OSR (contrary to what some say).
So AD&D 1e or Labyrinth Lord are in, Pathfinder or Two-fisted Tales are out.

Next, we have anonymous, who writes:

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"Have you looked at the rpg.geekdo hotness list recently? Even more swine games are on it - of course, they all have tons of comments and such. Look at how many 10s they get. At least now, we can see who is swine by their ratings :)"
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Yup, its pathetic, in fact. But that's what the Swine do, you have to give them credit for shameless and endless shilling, while we don't do enough of it.
There is an entry on WIKIPEDIA for the Storygame Swine who wrote "Breaking the Ice", an RPG that maybe 5 people have played (and that's her biggest "success"), but on the other hand there's no Wikipedia entry for, say, C.J. Carella, a vastly more successful game designer who happens to not be from the Forge.  Nor is there one for theRPGsite, one of the largest and most relevant forums about RPGs on the internet, which is bigger than the Forge (which of course does have an entry). Nor, might I add, is there an RPGPundit entry, even though while I'm no C.J. Carella, I'm much more likely to be known by the average internet gamer than the author of "breaking the ice".
Not to mention, I've published a more successful game than she has.

So what to do about all this?
Well, I would suggest that if this bothers people, they should mobilize. Get on wikipedia and write entries, and CHALLENGE the relevance or veracity of all the Forge-influenced entries already on there.
Do the same with "Geekdo".  Get on there and point out that these people are falsely exaggerating the popularity and quality of these games because they're on a religious crusade.
Its as simple as that.

RPGPundit

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Montevideo in Springtime

...is lovely, particularly when you have someone to share it with.
I don't have any real time to do a full Blog entry today, so instead, here's a picture of a Montevideo street close to my home.  Summer is coming here, and its getting awesome.




RPGPundit

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Gnomemurdered AP Report

So on Friday, as advertised, a group of us played a Gnomemurdered playtest. We had four players, and the scenario run was "Murder, She Gnomed".

The game went very well, some players started out rather skeptical about the game being enjoyable, they were not already predisposed to be Gnomemurdered fans, but everyone got into the game deeply. They loved the character creation, they enjoyed the scenario we ran, got really into the murder mystery, and the game evolved into sheer hilarity as soon as the Gnomes started showing up.

Here is the list of the dead:
Daniel: Fell through a trap door into a spiked pit the gnomes had set up. The lever that pulled the spiked pit was in a secret hallway Daniel had discovered. He refused to go into the hallway, but the lever was pulled by someone who did, and the trap door opened under Daniel's feet by sheer coincidence, daniel having a drink at the bar at the time.

Marcel: died valiantly in a standoff with five gnomes, in the secret tunnel. They came rushing at him, and he shot down as many as he could with his revolver before being stabbed multiple times, kicked in the balls and having his throat cut.

The Wench: Died from an attack of the elite Cuddly Death Gnomes. To her credit, she didn't trust these cutesy-poo Gnomes for a second. Unfortunately, she also didn't know that their mere presence in her general area was toxic, their saccharine sweetness causing her to develop Superdiabetes and die from insulin shock. She shot a Nazi in the head before she died though, so it wasn't all bad.

Alejo: Survived. He high-tailed it out of the house, climbed up a tree, jumped off it past the raging river and managed to swim to the other side. What he doesn't know is that he took two Gnomes with him, disguised as a human.

RPGPundit

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