Edit: Our first blog club post is from June 2006: “On thief skills in classic D&D”. I’ll post on Friday for us to discuss.
I had a fun idea: Let’s have a book club to read through the “classic” or significant blog posts of the OSR and chat about them! There are various lists of posts; I like this one by Marcia B.
The rationale
The blogosphere has always been a key part of the OSR / DIY D&D movement and there are thousands of blogs. You can’t read them all. I was struck by some points in @GusL’s post Maxims of OSR (linked in this thread).
“the Post OSR spends a lot of time reinventing things that people wrote on blogs in 2010, or stumbling into the same well known solutions and declaring they have “fixed” the play style”
and also
Maxims “have begun to take on the force of natural laws rather than suggestions or explanations of design decisions and play culture”
The plan
Every Friday night I post a thread to discuss the latest blog post, as well as a link to the next one to read in preparation for next Friday. Try to avoid discussing “next week’s” post until Friday comes around again. This is so busy people who need a few days to get around to reading it don’t miss out on the discussion.
The idea is not to slavishly worship these old posts as sources of truth (any more than the playstyle of Gygax’s original group), but to
Hear good ideas we might have missed (not keep reinventing the wheel)
Inspire one another with new ideas
Which posts?
Anyone have a list they like better than Marcia’s?
I might decide to skip some shorter/sillier posts in Marcia’s list if I don’t think there’s much to chat about. I’ll warn you if that’s my plan so you can tell me I’m missing an interesting discussion.
As we go along, people can suggest posts that are missing from the list. We can slot them in (trying to keep roughly chronological rather than jumping around).
If you’re interested in what we’re skipping, read this blurry bit:
The first post we’re skipping is “I got your threefold model right here, buddy!”, a parody of theorising that went on at the Forge. It probably would be useful to have a discussion of how The Forge led to many developments in the indie RPG scene, but Jeff’s post isn’t that, and without that context it’s not that helpful to us.
The second is ADDICT: a 20 page “comprehensive and systematic reconciliation of rules for combat procedure in AD&D”. That might be the kind of thing we’re willing to tackle in this club, but I think if we start with something that challenging we’ll all give up at the starting blocks.
Of the remaining 18 posts in the first 3 years of the list, I think we won’t need to skip any of those.
Interesting idea - I like Marcia’s list, and don’t know a better one, but I also think you might get more interesting results and understanding starting with some of the OSR manifestos - especially the less well know Philotomy’s Musings:
That’s a good idea. I’ve checked and that manifesto is the 7th link in Marcia’s list (so 5th for us since we’re skipping a couple). Since we’ll get there in a few weeks anyway I will stick to the chronological order, as it adds an interesting context.
I’d be interested in this. I like the idea of sifting through the old texts. I’d be curious as to how many sacred cows really just come from an idea someone shared back in the early 2010s.
" The second is ADDICT: a 20 page “comprehensive and systematic reconciliation of rules for combat procedure in AD&D ”. That might be the kind of thing we’re willing to tackle in this club, but I think if we start with something that challenging we’ll all give up at the starting blocks."
I downloaded ADDICT long ago and review it every now and again. It mostly serves as an example of how accumulating rules on an ad hoc basis leads to a huge mess after years and how every system should be reorganized and edited on a regular basis when official supplements add rules. There’s just so many ideas jammed into the rules without regard to how they interact with other ideas and rules.
I think this is a great idea. I’m pretty new to OSR and have been really enjoying discovering these blogs on my own in a very haphazard way. I’m really keen to follow along and read what people think of them.
I came here from the Discord Channel, not understanding that NSRCauldron was also a web forum. I think a book club of any sort is a fine idea. The irony here, though, is that the blogs you’ll be reading sourced their ideas from one or more web forums (such as Dragonsfoot, which is linked in the thief skills post, and to which I’m 99% positive the author was a member of). Dragonsfoot is still active. Philotomy Jurament, of Philotomy’s Musings, posts there regularly. A productive discussion requires a single point of reference, so I understand why you’ve fixated on blog posts. I just thought it was interesting that the mode of discourse has already come full circle while the original posters of the content are still discussing.
There’s an article/post that someone at Bully Pulpit Games wrote that really struck me when I read it. I’ll have to go find it again. It was about editing and how as a table editing each other’s scenes is a way to show you care about the game (if I’m remembering and portraying that right). Once I track it down I’ll post it here for consideration.
It doesn’t quite fit the mission of the book club to explore the classic OSR blogs, but I’ll share it here anyway. I found it very interesting and expanded how I think about things.
