How the OSR corroded my brain
Long title: How the OSR's... base assumptions and attempting those made me unlearn how to prep in the way I've always done, thus resulting in a worse experience overall.
Disclaimer: By "the OSR" here I mean the OSR as a marketing term, not necessarily as a movement writ large - but keep your pitchforks at half mast.
So, Havoc, why do you hate me and the things I love?
My first exposure to the OSR was in mid to late 2021, when I finally got around to reading that "Lamentations of the Flame Princess" book which my player from my 2018 duet Pendragon campaign had brought up a few times - though never as a recommendation.
At the time, that player, who had been my main player and lynchpin of my previous games, was generally uninterested in anything I was running, so I was jumping from game to game trying to get a group together in RRPG Firecast, the platform I was into back then.
I got taken in by Ben Milton's Questing Beast videos, the interesting kinda cute fairy-tale aesthetics of Dolmenwood, and the prospect of a game that was simple yet universally applicable. Now, at this time I had been running RPGs for around 9 years, I had ran a lot of World of Darkness, Pendragon, Usagi Yojimbo, Traveller, some PBTAs, and a bunch of other little experiments here and there, so I considered D&D the big gap in my knowledge.
On November 5th, 2021, I put together a live text game of The Dark of Hot Springs Island. I read the whole thing, stressed about how to best introduce the players to the "OSR playstyle" (only half-understood by me at the time), and ran 3 sessions before the players got either bored or uninterested. Some complained it just felt like they were wandering the island aimlessly while random shit happened - which they were - while others didn't like the stress of having to manage an inventory.
Later, on December 30th, 2021, I took the people from that group and decided to ease them into something less ambitious. This one was more successful, I ran Winter's Daughter and Black Wyrm of Brandonsford for them while using Pendragon as the backdrop, thus not bothering with classes or magic. It went on for 13 sessions and then fizzled out, and so I moved on to other games.
I ran Delta Green, tried making a Harry Potter game, ran a small 7 session duet campaign of The Troubleshooters, but in the back of my mind there was always something in the horizon. The golden OSR and its promises of easy to prepare modules which aligned perfectly with my sensibilities; a different game, one which I could discuss online with like-minded individuals of good taste, something which was missing in my repertoire. Surely this would elevate my gaming into a whole new level!
We crash and we burn and we crash
What followed were the Dog Days. About 2 years, 2022 and 2023, where my group dissolved completely and I failed to get a new one. Got into solo games, got out of solo games, got into Glorantha, and it only truly stopped in 2024, when I entered the Purple OSR Discord server and finally got back to running and playing (and in August of that year, when reddit randomly banned my account and I decided not to make a new one, although I was already stepping away from it by then).
On a personal note, those two years were also the first ones after graduating college, thinking about entering a new college, bailing from it, started going to concerts and clubs more often (now that I had money for it), did my postgraduate, etc. It was a time of uncertainties, as I wasn't sure if I wanted to stick to this profession, there was a world cup and a presidential election, everything in 2022 felt like it was up in the air. By 2023 things were a bit better, but the relationship I was in was... tough.
Point being: 2022 and 2023 felt like they resetted my brain with regards to RPGs. I wasn't playing with the same people anymore, I kept coming back to the OSR and its products, trying to make them fit and experiment with what they had - and the OSR introduced me to the concept of modules and prewritten adventures, which I had never run before, so when I got into Glorantha, I did it through written modules rather than doing my own thing. I slowly built up the habits of looking for modules, reading them, and wanting to run them so I could have something to discuss with people on /r/osr, or just so I felt like I wasn't "missing out" on the D&D experience.
In 2024 and 2025 I started running again, and had the longest campaigns I had ever since earlier in 2021, when I had ran my Feudal Japan game with a really strong group, but by then the damage was done and I felt like I only remembered my bad prepping habits, and none of my good prepping habits. Add that to the anxiety of getting used to running a game by voice - and in English! - and it's the perfect recipe for overthinking and bad vibes.
What do you mean by that?
This is how I prepped up until early 2021: I thought really hard about the game, thought up what would be interesting scenes or things to put in the game, using as inspiration either whatever I was reading at the time, or Pinterest images, or the players themselves, and then I put them in the game and improvised stuff for the players to do. I ran in live-text so this all was very easy - I never really memorised or thought about systems, for instance, because I knew I'd have a solid 3 to 6 minutes to look up any reference or roll on any table while the players wrote out their actions.
However, I also was predisposed to "stress overprepping". Thus when I ran Pendragon, I made sure to map out every single castle in Great Britain, give them a proper knight, figure out their armed forces and allegiance, and have it never matter at all. I didn't do this with every game, but I prepped through a maximalist style of "just make enough stuff that some of it will eventually be interesting".
By 2021, in the 'Chambara' game (the title of the 3 Feudal Japan games I had ran over the years), I had perfected this and was employing the players to outsource my work. I'd have a map, NPCs with wants and needs based either on what I needed or what the players told me they wanted, and a general timeline of events beyond their control. Then I'd start the game and let the players figure it out - live-text games could move relatively slowly, so I didn't mind if the interaction itself wasn't very compelling, because I knew it would be compensated through dialogue and drama.
After the Dog Days, I stopped doing most of that.
No more did I just "write out an interesting situation", instead I stalked modules to pilfer one that seemed cool. Gone were my interest in the game for itself, or for creativity's sake - in its place came a yearning to be a part of the greater RPG world, to not march to the beat of my own drum as much, just so I could feel like I knew what D&D was and could be able to talk about it.
Modules superseded the moment-to-moment prep, blog posts and random tables went from "inspiring and helpful" to mandatory. Instead of making a game and finding a blog post, or random table, or map that fit the bill of what I wanted, I found out things I wanted to put in the game first, and then thought about the game second. In short, the tail was wagging me.
With frog-boiling slowness, I found myself second guessing my choices in favour of published products, deferring my creativity to dead men and strangers, drawing inspiration Ouroboros-like from what I had done before, rather than letting myself be inspired by the art I was spending time with, or the players I was playing with. I grew afraid of making my own things, insecure that whatever I put in would not be "as good" as something that some American had written.
But here's the kicker: It was not satisfying. It could not be. You can feel me coming close to that conclusion time and time again in my play reports for the Sunrise Quest campaign, and primarily in this report for the Sunrise Glorantha campaign. As much as I got close to the truth there, I still hadn't realised the deeper issue, which were the hooks of "Game Design" in my brain. I couldn't think anymore of an interesting situation with a cool character without the Devil whispering doubt in my ear - "but where's the interactivity there? How will the players engage with it? Are you sure this is good? This seems boring as hell! What will others think - not your players, the people who will read this later when you post it on your blog, will they understand what you meant here in your prep notes? Does the tone of this thing fit with the ongoing campaign theme?"
There are modules I have ran that I could not tell you if I enjoyed them or not, because I was that caught up in my mind wanting to run them that I suppressed the part of my brain that examined why I wanted to run it, or if I liked it at all when I did. Do I like Black Wyrm of Brandonsford? Or did I like feeling clever for mixing it with Winter's Daughter?
Glimpses of my past methods could still be seen and felt through the cracks though. Here and there I would have a moment where I would improvise a description or a scene that wasn't on my notes in the middle of a module, or changed the module to fit my personal sensibilities, and it was like catching the perfume of a long lost ex on the middle of the street one day, briefly being transported to another time, only to catch yourself looking around in public and wondering if it had just been your imagination.
So you got better...?
Not really. I have diagnosed the issue, enough that I can write this post, but I still feel the looming shadows of the module-writers in my mind. I'm writing this on a Friday, knowing I have a And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow session tomorrow afternoon, and that I still don't have enough prepped. Except I can't tell if I really don't, or if it's the little Devil telling me that "Couple paragraphs and a few statblocks" are not enough.
Plus, there are things which simply don't translate well to voice games. I need to have more stuff prepared in a voice game because I don't have "2 to 3 silent minutes" to consider what to put in there every time; I can't just fill time with dialogue and exposition because those just do not happen as much.
But don't get me wrong, I don't think it was all bad. There are tools which are useful for me - having a list of treasures, for instance, helps me keep my bearings as to what could be an interesting reward for a deed in a game. I learned how D&D worked and had some fun with it, I played with modules and found out they weren't for me, I think there's value in that. But I can't deny that I feel like I'm just now getting better from a very long cold.
And sometimes I sit down and struggle to think of a single thing that would be interesting to put on a game, or in the game I'm running right now, but I also know I would struggle like this back then too, because I know I'm very picky about what I want or don't want in my games. And now I have a whole world of things which I'm better informed on and, thus, a more finely honed sense of what is it that I want on the game. I could not have done this without crashing face first on the OSR blogosphere, modules, and brainworms.
Now I know I don't need shit to play my game. I don't need dungeons, resource management, modules, one hundred million different retroclones, DUNGEONS & DRAGONS â„¢ Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures, giving a shit to what Gary Gygax thought or didn't think about games, "elegant game design", hexcrawls, depthcrawls, shitcrawls, the perfect random table for this moment, European Extreme Lethality, or whatever "innovation" the blog pundits are yapping about these days with their "dice towers" or whatever. I can actually just play the goddamn game like I did for nine years, play the world, play the fiction, and through these: have fun.