It's interesting how the dominant #OSR title seems to change every so often.
A few years back, the default starter game was Lamentations of the Flame Princess, then it shifted to Old School Essentials, and now I get the impression that it's shifting to Dungeon Crawl Classics.
Not really sure why this happens... Lamentations had the Zak S thing but OSE haven't messed up and I don't get the impression that DCC has suddenly started doing noticeably better work.
This is also a problem with the RPG scene's lack of critical hinterland... It is hard to get a sense of who is putting out the best work as the pool of discussed adventures is always really shallow.
LOTFP and OSE have famous adventures but they're all a few years old now. Are people nowadays more likely to go it alone than work with publishers? Has their output declined?
The more recent LOTFP adventures I have read have all felt very gimmicky. Thematic focus yielding narrower texts.
@Tim_Eagon Very true. Lamentations' publisher has a track record of snickering trollish puerility that makes me very reluctant to look into their current work... despite having run the game for ages.
Having massively over-promised on an immature technology with really quite a limited range of productive use-cases, #AI firms are now contriving to deliver.
However, because there is no tangible product, they are using their financial might and institutional power to bludgeon the Internet and society as a whole into an AI-shaped hole.
It's like a company that makes anti-diarrhoea meds pumping laxatives into the water-supply to engineer enough demand to justify billion of investment.
@Printdevil I encountered an investment guy and he was talking about the third industrial revolution and I asked how putting low-level artists out of work was revolutionary and he didn't have a response. I also think the decree that AI art couldn't be copyrighted was a major setback as it means advertising and Hollywood can't just lay off all their creative. @vdonnut
@kyonshi I was quite impressed that banks et al didn't get taken in by crypto but they have been absolutely 100% rinced by AI (which seems to be a lot of the same people as crypto, possibly because they invested in computing power and have now pivotted) @Printdevil@vdonnut
Quality level: Weird stuff found at an import store (And, to be clear, I am perfectly fine with this. Will seek improvements, but this clears "I would not be ashamed to sell this".)
The Bluesky #OSR feed is fascinating as it shows how many people seem to have passionate views on the OSR based upon someone else's Twitter rant and a butt load of weird projection.
At the moment, two lads who acknowledge that Traveller is not an OSR game, are basically harassing some dude for validation because he went low-key viral with a well-phrased observation about the OSR.
The one lesson I took from philosophy is that 75% of arguments stem from people using the same words to refer to different things.
Social Media made this worse by creating an ocean of arguments best summarised as 'I strongly feel that this word should refer to X, why does everyone else persist in using it to refer to Y'
Some lad on here gearing up for a gangbusters campaign. I had so much fun with that game back in the day...
I remember playing a deranged Evangelical beat cop who would do things like hold a car full of rowdy college guys at gunpoint and force them to sing 'Onward Christian soldiers' he also locked a bunch of mobsters in a burning speakeasy and opined that 'God will reclaim his own'
@SJohnRoss Such an eccentric game too... All the different XP-generation mechanics so everyone worked cases from different directions before coming together to bring it home!
I keep coming across mentions of the 13th age Kickstarter & I feel like I’m missing something. I have 13th age & one of the adventures for it. BUT despite the fact that it was created by game developers with highly respected skills, and definitely has some interesting and noteworthy ideas in it, nothing about it made me say “ooh i wanna play this!”
@masukomi Because the market for RPGs is dominated by aging upper middle-class people who are happy to spunk money up the wall in the name of nostalgia?
Those types of PCs only get funnier when the characterisation starts to slip and you wind up with the mental image of Columbo cutting off someone's head or getting into a drunken arm-wrestling contest with an orc barbarian.
I was quite taken aback to learn that #Chaosium had lost the #Elric license.
They had that for decades but evidently the BBC got the rights for a Hawkmoon adaptation (which never materialised) and so Elric! and Stormbringer slipped out of print.
I'm not a big Elric-head but I remember the sheer number of Stormbringer modules and how some of them (Sea kings of the Purple Towns) were actually good #brp#ttrpg
I find it super weird that Raffles the Gentleman thief isn't more of a figure in the #OSR bro does burglaries purely in order to buy expensive cigarettes, nice booze, and maintain a nice address.
It's also a series of short stories so overtly queer that when the legendary Catholic spy fiction author Graham Greene wrote a fanfic play about the main characters and made them a couple.
I think the decline of the GURPS toolkit book is tied to RPGs drifting away from fiction and back towards tabletop games.
Someone raised on boardgames and 5e isn't going to respond well to the idea that a book (that looks like shit) for a game they don't play is going to be mire useful and inspiring than a branded plug-and-play supplement.
A while back, this would have annoyed me as that's $150M that could have made three good films, not to speak of the clogged cinema space and the wasted talent that could have been working on better projects.
Now I just feel a profound sense of pity for the people whose imaginations have atrophied to the point where they'll see that poster and go "Oh... That might be a fun way to spend the limited time I have available to me before death". #film
@Printdevil I would never deny that people feel joy when watching these films.
Mainstream culture is a skinner box and flashing green up on the screen will inevitably produce beatific grins and soiled trousers because that is what skinner boxes are designed to do.
