The Games That Remember With Me

I  keep clearing shelves, and the same games keep earning their spot back.

Not because they are perfect. Not because someone on a video told me they were the current optimal choice. They stay because when I open them, I still recognize the nights they came from. My brother and I used to sit at the table with these books, and the problems in front of us were the ones the dice and the characters had to solve, not the ones the rulebooks were inventing so we would need another volume next year.

I am done with collecting "to have."

Every book you buy with one of those games just makes you more unhappy with the whole thing.

Most of the games these days have had their run and are 100% complete. I am happy with that.

Palladium still sits there. Rifts still sits there. GURPS and Champions still sit there. OSRIC still sits there. They are not museums. They still work when I want to run something. They still let me finish the design work myself instead of waiting for the next crowdfunded subclass that will be obsolete before the PDF lands, or worse, banned for being game-breaking.

I used to think the point of collecting was to stay current. That was the trap. Current became more books that never reached the table, more art that looked like it had never seen dirt, and more rules that removed friction and cost so characters could look good while doing nothing particularly hard. After a while, the shelves filled with things that made me feel like I was collecting the hobby instead of playing it. The Christmas tree I keep lit reminds me better of who I am. So do the books that were already here when the algorithm started demanding the worst version of the same conversation every day.

Those older games do not ask me to be someone else. They do not reframe the monsters so no one feels bad. They do not hand out inspiration on a schedule so the outcome stays comfortable. They don't pretend the point of the evening is to optimize a build finished before the session started. They just sit there and still do the job we asked them to do in the 90s. Sometimes that job is high-powered and comic-book. Sometimes it is low and gritty. Either way, I can still open the book, make the thing I want, and play.

I want the game to surprise me, not force me to a website or make me sign up for another subscription.

I am not interested in holding my nose for a game that feels hollow just to stay part of a conversation I don't like. The shelves have limited space. The nights have limited time. The games that stay are the ones that still feel like part of the life I actually lived with them. Everything else can go in the garage until it earns a different answer.

Or it will be sold since it says nothing to me.

That is the test now. Not whether a game is new. Not whether someone else is excited about it this month. Whether it still remembers the same things I do when I pick it up.

OSRIC: Structured Enough for the Weird Stuff

On SBRPG, the current run focuses on why OSRIC 3 works- fighters who actually shape the fight, phased casting that keeps magic honest, and limited options that make the world mean something instead of turning into a character-creation menu. That focus makes sense. Over here the same books sit on the shelf next to DCC, Hyperborea, Swords & Wizardry Revised, and the rest of the crawl pile, and the question is different: can the game still hold up once you start pouring gonzo into it?

It can. In fact, the structure helps.

Most of the time, when people say they want “old-school with weird,” they mean they want the referee to invent everything and keep the rules out of the way. That works until the third session, when someone swings a laser sword at a phase-shifting demon while a mutant thief tries to backstab it and a cleric is mid-cast. At that point, you either have procedures or a conversation that eats the rest of the night. OSRIC already has the procedures. Weapon specialization puts the fighter first in the phase order from level one. Multiple attacks and the way the round is built give the martial characters something to do besides “I swing again.” Segment-based casting means the magic-user who wants to drop the big spell still stands there for a few beats while the weird thing chews on the party. That timing does not disappear just because the monster has three heads and a personality disorder.

The limited default races do the same job. Humans, elves, dwarves, and the rest of the short core list are enough. If someone wants to play an irradiated scavenger, a half-demon, or a guy whose left arm is a living crossbow, that is a conversation and a few rulings, not a new ancestry that comes with a free trinket and a paragraph of lore. The sheet stays short. The weird lives in the equipment, the curses, the places they go, and the things they decide to do. That is usually where the interesting gonzo was anyway.

Classic modules still drop in clean. So do Hyperborea adventures, a lot of S&W material, and anything written for 1E that is not welded to a specific setting assumption. You can take a DCC funnel’s best room ideas, strip the zero-level meat grinder down to something that fits a small party of specialists, and run it. The resource game still bites. Damage sticks. Rest is not free. The party that treats every room like an encounter to solve with the newest power on the sheet will run out of hit points and spells before they run out of map. That pressure works when the dungeon is full of things that don't care about balance.

None of this requires treating OSRIC as a museum piece or an AD&D emulator. The combat round is tight enough that you can hang weird tactics on it without rewriting the initiative system. A monster that only acts on certain phases, a trap that forces a character to re-roll initiative mid-round, a magic item that lets someone trade an attack for a different phase—these are small additions that sit on top of the existing structure instead of replacing it. The same goes for magic. If a spell feels too clean for the tone you want, add a casting-time cost or a small chance of a side effect when used in a contaminated area. You are not fighting the rules to make the game feel dangerous; you are using the parts of the rules that already push in that direction.

Plenty of monster and magic-item material already sits in the OSRIC books and the older 1E-compatible piles. Most of it can be reskinned or slightly twisted without breaking anything. The game does not need a new bestiary every six months to stay interesting. It needs a referee who is willing to put something strange in a room and let the party’s existing tools (timing, specialization, resource management, player ideas) interact with it.

That is the part that still feels like the old crawl. The rules are steady. The world can be anything. You don't have to keep buying the next pack of options to keep the table moving, and you don't have to invent a new resolution system every time the party meets something not in the original monster list. OSRIC gives you the spine. The gonzo is whatever you decide to hang on it.

The OSR is Steady

What I love about the OSR is that the rules are cross-compatible and the community is mostly steady, predictable, and consistent. We don't need a rules revision or tons of special action types based on some made-up game designer's feelings about what D&D should be. Since version 3, D&D has been this ever-changing thing, like an MMO that needs to turn over the compost pile of class balance to keep things interesting. We get game-designer fads that sweep through the core game design and then get abandoned.

The OSR? They usually pick a version, clean things up, make a few optional expansions, and leave it there. While DCC makes the most changes, the designers of DCC don't put the game in the OSR at all, and that is a good choice.

Old School Essentials is my favorite BX, and Swords & Wizardry is my all-time favorite Zero Edition. Adventures Dark & Deep is an incredible First Edition implementation. Any adventure written for them is cross-compatible.

I don't get that in 5E. I am buying shelves of books for piles of options I will never use. The library grows and grows. The game gets fat and bloated. I am not really getting anything for all that bloat, and as it grows, the game gets worse, not better.

Why am I buying rules I will never use?

It feels like the worst of hoarding and collector-market game design, and at a point, it is tough to even call the bloated behemoth of a library a "game" anymore.

For me, a game has to be simple, and you should be able to store the rules in your head. For most OSR games, this is easy.

For 5E, it starts off easy, but as your library grows, you are the frog in a slow-boiling pot, and you don't realize your game is a pile of dead books until it is already too late.

Swords & Wizardry Revised Revisited

I like Swords & Wizardry Revised and the two expansion books that pair nicely with the system. This is a true reflection of a "zero edition" game, before the D&D and AD&D split, but pulling in a few new ideas, first edition creatures, and a simplified play style that grabs me much more than most OSR games. This game competed with Old School Essentials for me just in its completeness, high-level play support, and options once the other two books are considered.

That still feels right.

Swords & Wizardry Complete Revised is a single book that behaves like a finished game. Nine classes. Five ancestries. Spells, monsters, magic items, wilderness procedures, hirelings, strongholds, naval and siege combat. High-level play is in the text instead of waiting for a later product. The treasure tables are cleaner than earlier printings. Morale is in the book. Tougher monsters pay better XP. There are procedures for random castles and spell research. You can take a campaign from first level into domain play without assembling the last third of the rules from three other games.

That is the zero-edition idea I keep coming back to. Not White Box starvation, and not a B/X clone wearing a 1974 jacket. OD&D as it grew through Greyhawk, Blackmoor, and the magazine material people actually used, then tightened so it plays.

OSE is still the prettier shelf game, and it is easier to teach in pieces. I understand why it won the presentation war. The new OSE even adds a page of rules for high-level play, which helps. What it does not give you is the spell support that high-level play needs. Past the B/X ceiling, you are still improvising, converting, or pulling high-level spells from other games. That is workable. It is also the exact gap that kept S&W in the conversation for me.

S&W Revised still feels like the game before the Basic/Advanced split hardened into doctrine. Ascending or descending AC, the table's call. Saving throws that do not need a flowchart. Combat that does not pause the room for a condition lookup. The referee is trusted. Player skill still matters.

Then the two books that sit next to the core.

The Book of Options is the pile of magazine material you would have photocopied in 1978. Eleven optional classes: barbarian, bard, chivalric knight, demon hunter, dwarven priest, elf-blade, illusionist, necromancer, troubadour, warlock, wrath-chanter. Gnomes and Stygians as ancestries. More spells and magic items. Multiclassing written out. Terrain encounter tables in the back so a wilderness hex is not a blank stare. You can ignore half of it and the original nine classes still stand. That is the part I like. Options stay optional.

Fiends & Foes is the other half. Complete Revised already has a working bestiary. This one adds more than three hundred additional monsters, including a lot of the old Monstrosities material brought in line with Revised morale and XP, plus new weirdness that still feels like original D&D gonzo. Ultharians on plane-shifting flamingoes. Foul-mouthed fey cats. Artificers of Yothri. First-edition creatures sitting next to things that would have lived in a Judges Guild booklet. You do not need every Tome of Horrors on day one. You need this if you want the campaign to stop recycling the same dozen stat blocks.

Add to that, anything out of BX, AD&D, or 2nd Edition just works with this game as-is. OSE Adventures? Labrinth Lord megadungeons? Classic D&D or AD&D Modules? It all just works, just like anything for this game would work with the rest of the OSR.

Together, the three books do the unglamorous thing: they stop asking you to finish the rules somewhere else. Completeness is not flashy. High-level play is not flavor text. Options are not automatically bloat if you can leave them on the shelf.

I still keep For Gold & Glory and OSRIC around. I still like character kits more than a new class every time someone wants a gladiator. Swords & Wizardry Revised is simply the version of 0e I want to run. Close enough that the adventure pile still works. Complete enough that I am not patching holes mid-campaign. And once Options and Fiends & Foes are on the table, OSE has to work a little harder to stay in first place.

That is the game. A zero-edition engine that grew up without forgetting why it was fun.

DCC: A Mirror to Appendix N

While it isn’t sold as an OSR game, Dungeon Crawl Classics is my favorite OSR game. It actually goes beyond the OSR, all the way back to Appendix N, and rebuilds from there. While the OSR is very interested in simulating specific versions of the rules, DCC is more a game that takes the “look and feel” of the 1970s and early 80s, and develops the game in a new direction, taking 3.5E concepts and rebuilding the entire game from the chassis up.

Joseph Goodman has been explicit about this from the start. He didn’t set out to clone B/X or 1e. He spent years reading every book on Gygax’s Appendix N list—Howard, Vance, Moorcock, Leiber, Burroughs, Wellman, Anderson, the pulps—and then asked what a game would look like if it tried to enable those stories instead of recreating the 1974 or 1981 rulebooks that grew out of them. The result uses a streamlined 3.5 chassis (d20, classes, three saves) but immediately starts tearing it apart and putting it back together in service of that older, weirder literature.

That’s the real difference. A lot of OSR work is an act of preservation or reconstruction: get the math of B/X just right, make the modules interchangeable, recapture the exact procedures of a particular edition. DCC treats those editions as one possible outcome of Appendix N, not the destination. Magic isn’t a reliable resource you spend; it’s dangerous, unpredictable, and frequently corrupting, the way it is in Vance or Moorcock. Warriors don’t just swing a sword—they attempt Mighty Deeds that let them do the kind of cinematic, slightly impossible things Conan or Fafhrd actually do on the page. Characters start as 0-level nobodies rolled 3d6 down the line and thrown into a funnel because that’s how a lot of those stories begin: ordinary people with no special destiny, just the scores they were born with, tossed into the meat grinder until they either die or become legends. Luck is a real, spendable, dwindling resource because pulp heroes live on it.

The art and presentation lean hard into the same era without being a museum piece. Doug Kovacs, Jim Roslof, and Jim Holloway- that whole late-70s/early-80s visual language of lava-lamp covers, shag-carpet grimness, and velvet-poster excess. It looks like the paperbacks on the shelf when those first games were being played, not a later attempt to recreate the rulebooks those games produced.

This is why it sits in a strange but productive place. It’s “OSR” in the sense that it wants the same sense of wonder, lethality, and player-driven chaos that people chase in the old books. It’s not OSR in the sense that it refuses to stay inside the fences of any particular edition. In the core book, Goodman asked other publishers to consider moving past the boundaries of “TSR mimicry” and go one era further back. The game itself followed through on that idea.

The more I play it, the more I think that’s the part that actually feels old-school to me now: not the exact procedures, but the willingness to let the literature lead and the rules follow. A lot of the OSR is still in conversation with D&D itself. DCC just went and held a mirror up to Appendix N instead.

Shadowdark is My Favorite Version of 5E

I like the other alternate 5E systems. Tales of the Valiant keeps the familiar chassis and sands off some of the worst 5E edges. Level Up Advanced 5E gives you more options, more depth, and more things to tinker with if that’s the game you want. Both are solid. I own them, I’ve run them, I get why people like them.

Shadowdark is the one I actually want to play.

It’s clean. It’s simple. It’s easy. You sit down, you make a character in minutes, and you’re in the dungeon. No feat tax, no bloated skill list, no “let me look that up” every other round. The traditional DC system just works: roll d20, add your modifier, beat the number. That’s it.

And it handles magic perfectly.

No spell slots. You know your spells. You try to cast one by rolling against a DC based on the spell’s tier. Succeed, and it happens — you can try it again later. Fail, and that spell is gone until you rest. Natural 1 and something goes wrong (mishap table for wizards, atonement for priests). That’s it. Magic feels dangerous again instead of being a reliable toolbox you manage like a spreadsheet.

I’m not flipping through hundreds of pages of rules just to sit down and play a game. One book. Real-time torch. Darkness that actually matters.

This isn’t a traditional rules-light game. There aren’t many rules, but the ones that exist- the real-time torch, the tight focus, the way failure actually costs you- create an intense experience. Shadowdark is laser-focused on dungeon runs. It does dungeon crawling better than 5E.

Mainstream 5E feels more interested in character-building. It puts the burden of balancing the mess the players’ creativity creates on the referee. “I’m a monk-warlock-paladin!” What is even that? What game-breaking powers does this combo bring to the table? I’m sure we’ll all find out together and suffer through it as the adventure is blown through with ease.

If I want expansions, they’re there. The community has published a lot of good stuff — extra classes, new ancestries, whole settings, adventures that slot right in. Variety is there for the taking if that’s what you’re after.

But the core stays tight. The torch timer keeps the table moving. There’s no time to debate the perfect multiclass combo or flip through three sourcebooks looking for the right feat. The light is burning. The dungeon is waiting. You either go forward, or you go back.

That’s the difference. 5E keeps adding more character options and then asks the referee to make it all work. Shadowdark gives you a focused game and lets the community add the extras on top if you want them. The crawl itself never gets buried.

That’s the game I want to run tonight.

Mail Room: Dungeon Dwelling Creatures (DCC)

From DCC, MCC, Star Crawl, and XCrawl, Goodman Games has the best "games for your imagination" in the industry right now. Today, we continue that run with Dungeon Dwelling Creatures, a DCC-genre game where you play the monsters. I got the crowdfunding PDF release for this today, and I like this game.

The monsters are quirky and strange, sort of mirroring DCC-style classes, but using the system in interesting and unique ways. Instead of luck, we get Vile, which is your Luck-like "power of evil." All the monsters have an icky factor, and none of them are cute or adorable. A huge problem with "play a monster" games is that they get too cutesy and chibi, and that opens the door to hurt feelings and problem players. A cute fairy dragon with butterfly wings would be inappropriate for this game, where a spider that sucks people's brains out would fit right in.

I would love to see expansion monsters for this game. What we have is great, quirky, and cool.

This reminds me of the Monsters Monsters! game from Flying Buffalo, the spiritual successor to the classic Tunnels & Trolls game. You play the monsters. Civilization is crushing you. You are the minions and mooks that live in a dungeon (and even the DCC modules) as the bad guys. The good guys show up and crush your dreams, loot the place, laugh, and head back to town.

A few times.

Maybe they burn everything out in a 10-minute adventure day, and you are watching them pull the typical party nonsense by coming back daily. Maybe you follow them back to town and give them a lesson in how the monsters who put up with this nonsense teach them a lesson.

This is close to being a new, major game in the DCC line, and it feels like a surprise release. The bestiary is excellent and covers many more of the classics than the main DCC book. This feels like "the other side" of the DCC experience, putting players in an unfamiliar yet cool situation.

You are the monsters.

Deal with those pesky heroes.

A very surprising release, and I can't wait to get my hardcover.

(Cross-posted from SBRPG.com on 7/12)