Cold Turkey on the Shelves

The last 5E versions still sitting on my shelves are Nimble 5E and Shadowdark. Everything else has gone to the garage. Tales of the Valiant stays in PDF only. I’ve gone cold turkey on the mainstream 5E collection, and the room already feels different.

OSRIC, Dragonbane, DCC, Draw Steel, and a stack of other games now have space they never had. Old School Essentials and BX have their own shelf. Traveller is out. GURPS has always stayed out, but it is finally free of the constant 5E pull that used to steal attention from it. Hero System found a spot. Shadowdark sits near Battletech. Nimble is small enough to live next to the dice without arguing for space. The Without Number games have their own shelf now, and they actually invite me to open them.

Going cold turkey on 5E and modern D&D feels better than I expected. I’m engaged again. Ten years and eight full shelves were too much game. The collection got large enough that the game itself died under its own weight- too many books to play, too many options competing for the same nights, too much of the hobby spent managing the library instead of running anything. Smaller games are simply more compelling when the shelves aren’t already full of the same system in slightly different covers.

GURPS is the only real exception, and even then 90% of what sits there is sourcebooks and reference material, not core options that demand constant attention. DCC takes a few shelves, but the same idea holds: most of it is adventures, not another layer of character options. My next-biggest game, Hero System, still only needs half a shelf. Almost everything else is a one- or two-book system.

If I want “D&D,” I already have the original in OSRIC (or For Gold & Glory). Nothing that came after it has been better, and the classic adventures are fully supported. I also have all of BX in OSE. That is more than enough D&D on the shelves. Without 5E competing for the same space and the same evenings, OSE and OSRIC finally get the attention they deserve. They feel better when nothing else is crowding them out.

The shelves are more inviting now. The games that remain are the ones I actually want to play.

Rules-Light Still Needs Rules

I like rules-light. That part of the OSR still works for me. You can keep the whole game in your head, open a book only when something weird shows up, and spend the night on the dungeon instead of the index. OSE, Swords & Wizardry, and even a cleaned-up OSRIC do this cleanly. You are not hunting through three hundred pages for the exact wording of a bonus or the edge case on a reaction roll. The game flows at a natural pace. That is the OSR design mantra, and most of the time it is the right one.

It can also teach bad habits if you treat “rules-light” as “rules-optional.”

I have sat at tables where the referee never actually used the procedures that were still in the book. Exploration turns vanished. Reaction rolls got replaced by “how do you talk to them?” Resource tracking became a vibe. Every situation turned into a conversation about what “should” happen instead of what the characters could actually do with the tools they had. The players got good at arguing for the outcome they wanted. The referee got tired of making the same call twice and started winging bigger and bigger pieces. By the third session, the game was mostly negotiation. Nothing was written down, so nothing stuck. The next week the same situation got a different answer because nobody remembered the first one.

That is not player skill. That is the absence of shared procedures. The lightness didn't remove the need for consistency; it shifted the entire load onto the people at the table. If those people do not bring the discipline, the game drifts. New players especially never learn the underlying verbs and game methodology. They learn that the answer is whatever the referee will accept this time. Older players learn that pushing the ruling is more efficient than planning. The dungeon stops being a place with friction and starts being a stage where the loudest or most persuasive voice wins.

Letting the loudest players rule the game is such a bad habit. At least in games with rules, I have some protection as a referee, and so do the quieter players around the table; I am trying to give them a chance to shine.

Heavier systems have their own problems. 5E will happily bury you in special action types and optional rules until the only way to stay consistent is to look everything up. That is slow and design obesity. But the written procedures at least give you a default when the table is tired, or the referee is new. Rules-light removes that default. It assumes both sides already know how to play the game they are about to invent. When that assumption is wrong, you do not get elegant rulings. You get slop that feels free until the inconsistencies start stacking up and nobody can remember why the last three doors opened the way they did.

Rules-light story-games can also degenerate into the loudest players dominating the table. Story-gaming, in particular, appeals to players who try to "buffalo" their way through a situation by being loud and butting in all the time.

The fix is not to add more rules. Most of the good OSR books already have the procedures: exploration turns, reaction rolls, morale, resource management, the basic structure of a combat round. The ones that stick around (OSE, S&W Revised, OSRIC, the better BX clones) kept those because they work. Using them is not “playing against the spirit of the OSR.” It is using the parts of the design that keep the lightness from collapsing. House rulings stay small and get written down so the next session starts from the same place. Players still get to try clever things; the procedures just make the cost and the risk visible instead of purely social.

I still prefer the thin books. I would rather run a night of OSE or Swords & Wizardry than flip through another 5E sourcebook that mostly exists to give people more buttons. The difference is that the rules-light approach only stays light when the table treats the remaining procedures as real. When everyone already knows the verbs, the rulings stay sharp, and the game stays fast. When nobody does, that same lightness becomes an excuse to never decide anything twice, or just toss everything, even combat and damage, to off-the-cuff rulings.

That version of an OSR game doesn't last, and it doesn't feel like the game the books were trying to protect.

The Without Number Games: Solo BX Done Right

These are the best solo BX games ever written.

Not “good with a side of generators.” Not “BX if you add Mythic and a notebook.” As they sit, Kevin Crawford’s Without Number line- Stars, Worlds, Cities, Ashes- is already a complete solo engine. Each one can give you years of play without a second book, an oracle supplement, or waiting for the next product to drop. The free editions are real games. The deluxe editions just give you more toys. You can start tonight.

The chassis is pure BX. Six attributes 3–18, d20 combat, the familiar three saves, hit points that matter, and a class or classless path that stays small. Skills sit on 2d6, that Traveller curve that rewards competence without turning every check into a power-gamer puzzle. You already know how to fight. You already know how to die. Nothing on the sheet is trying to be the star of the session.

What makes them solo powerhouses is everything outside the sheet.

The generators do not spit out flavor blobs. They spit out situations. Two tags on a world, a city, an enclave, a ruin. Enemies, friends, complications, things, places. Collide them, and the place already has work. You haven't named the bartender yet, and the session already has shape. Do it twenty times, and you have a sector, a region, a city district, or a stretch of wastes that will still be generating jobs three years from now.

Then the faction turn keeps the world moving when you are not at the table. The groups already on the map grab resources, fight, fall apart, and send trouble whether you asked for it or not. Ignore a court, a corp, a combine, or a mutant enclave for three sessions and the sandbox notices. Most pure BX games stop when the players stop. These do not.

Solo play in a normal BX game is usually “I need an oracle, a hex map, and a pile of random tables I stole from somewhere else.” Here the tables are the game. You roll a world or a neighborhood, note the two tags, run the short faction procedure if you want the pressure to keep building, then play the job that falls out. When that job ends, the map still has heat. You do not have to invent the next thing from nothing. The book already knows how to invent it.

The free versions contain almost all of this. You can hand the PDF around, generate a sector or a city tonight, and start. Deluxe adds thicker toolkits and extra options. It does not unlock the door to play. That choice alone puts them in a different category from most modern OSR products that sell you the chassis and then charge for the parts that actually make long campaigns possible.

They also talk to each other. A spike-drive wreck can land in the Latter Earth. An operator from Cities can bleed into Ashes. Same verbs, different generator. You are not locked into one genre for the life of the campaign. The engine stays small; the universe gets bigger when you want it to.

I have watched pure BX solo campaigns stall because the referee (me) eventually ran out of ideas that felt as sharp as the first ones. The generators and the faction turns remove that failure point. The content does not get thinner the longer you play. It gets denser. Factions remember. Tags keep colliding. Places you left alone keep changing. That is what “years of enjoyment” actually looks like on the page: a sandbox that does not need you to keep feeding it new books.

Most OSRs still sell you a character sheet and hope you will invent the rest. Crawford sold the sheet, then spent the rest of the page count teaching the world how to answer back. Even without a single extra solo tool, they are already the strongest pure BX solo experiences on the shelf. The free ones prove it. The rest is just more ideas, adventures, and infinite play.

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.