The Curious Case of Gamers Writing on Substack

 Just a brief comment after a weekend of noticing a lot of weird stuff in my Substack feed. Until fairly recently Substack was a thing I subscribed to a few blogs, mostly political commentary, and out of the blue I accidentally discovered a gaming Substack or two, then by way of Substack's "referral" process where you can get free subs to other similar blogs I suddenly had a ton of gaming Substacks in my feed, which was honestly nice. I could never find a way to parse out Substack easily in the past; it seems like you have to sort of find a thing, then move within its circle to find other like things.

All that is to say that Substack seems like an awkward place to find stuff randomly or that is otherwise low profile or special and niche in design. But somehow, all of a sudden, I have a lot of it. The downside is I think a lot of it is sort of tonally related to what other Substacks subscribe to, or something, because a disproportionate amount of the stuff in my feed seems to boil down to one of four types:

1. Stacker complaining about how no one can find him on Substack so he's leaving;

2. Stacker who really, really hates Shadowdark and thinks everyone who likes it is a malicious crisis actor (or insert OSE or whatever system in place of Shadowdark) out to get him;

3. Endless, unending solo journaling Stacks that at no point bother to explain how to solo game like this, or how it is different from simply engaging in a creative writing process;

4. Finally, the gatekeepers! I found where the gaming gatekeepers all went, and it is on Substack. There are some really vitriolic people over there. 

Anyway, this surprised me as over the last several years the much quieter but consistent realm of Blogspot and associated other blog sites have calmed down and been quietly doing our thing, which is just enjoying games and not being toxic. Amazing!

Old-School Essentials vs. Shadowdark - Battle of the Retro OSR Giants???

 As I assembled all of the many half-size tomes I have on the shelf, realizing I had bought a disproportionate number of books (and booklets, and brochures, etc.) for a few games in particular (Mothership, OSE, Shadowdark, Mork Borg and to a lesser extent Liminal Horror), I started comparing the crop of Shadowdark books to the Old-School Essentials tomes. I've run a couple campaigns or multi-session adventures with both systems, though not as yet been able to commit to picking one of them for a long-haul. In many ways these two games are extremely similar, at least in terms of their overall goals, but in other ways they are surprisingly different. Here's a few of the more interesting differences I noticed, with the caveat that I won't talk specific rules too much, because both systems are mechanically quite different. Anyway:

Design Goals:

OSE: it's goal is to create a retroclone emulator for Basic/Expert D&D and the Advanced version gives you the tools to bolt on an AD&D style experience. It's not restricting itself exclusively to true emulation, though it does so surprisingly well, and expansions and 3PP content offer a really diverse array of interpretations of fantasy powered by OSE (Planar Compass, Kalinga Plateau, The Painted Wastelands and Dolmenwood being the four I am most familiar with). A lot of weird settings get the OSE treatment, though other weird settings seem to gravitate more toward the Into the Odd mechanics. I think it depends on the depth to which the designers of a setting want to plumb the rules; Into the Odd seems to be the preferred choice for player groups that are extremely shy of mechanical depth, while OSE ends up attracting a broader range of interest for those who want an old school mechanical feel, but are inspired by weird art, themes and interpretations of fantasy that may have been popular in their style but were too "out there" for D&D's early era shepherds (TSR).

Shadowdark: It looks to me like Shadowdark's core intent, which was to provide numeric compatibility with older editions of D&D as well as D&D 5E resources, ended up really being about creating a tightly defined set of rules for a very specific style of play: dungeon crawling, completely unapologetic, with all of the traditional bells and whistles, or at least those as perceived through the lens of a new age of gamers who love the notion of what D&D was without having actually been there. Most of the Shadowdark players I know aren't picking it up because they want a reasonable facsimile of original D&D or B/X D&D, but rather they want a D&D 5E experience without all the clutter. For this reason Shadowdark has a lot of interesting but weird little rules that are designed to streamline the experience, but also trip up older gamers or those used to early D&D (such as the way leveling works, or the way magic works) and don't in actual play feel very old school. Shadowdark is to OSR what a modern computer game that touts its amazing pixels s being Playstation One era style graphics (while being totally better looking than the actual original PS1 games of its time) are like....simulacra.

Winner: OSE wins by a slim margin, because it really is closely backward compatible and very customizable within a time-tested framework of rules. But Shadowdark is its own special beast, and if you think of it as being like the RPG equivalent of Hero Quest, its role makes more sense.

Rules Presentation:

OSE: OSE's core strength is that it's the most pragmatic, no-nonsense presentation of a OSR ruleset I have ever seen. There is no authorial intrusion, there is no empty chit-chat, there is precisely as much flavor text as is necessary, no more and no less. It's incredibly clear and well-organized (across all its rulebook iterations), and finding what you need is a breeze. So Necrotic Gnome's core presentation was to make OSE very, very user friendly. This is a huge plus as I see it; when I pick up this book and browse through it, I find myself urgently interested in playing it, which is something a lot of RPGs out there fail to accomplish. 

Likewise, adventure design for OSE is concise, driven by necessary information only, and laid out in a clean and to-the-point format designed to make GM prep smooth and easy. OSE has borrowed heavily from the indie zinerpg scene to manifest a module design approach which works incredibly well, and I feel like even Wizards of the Coast has noticed this and tried some half-baked attempts to emulate this with recent books (such as Forgotten Realms) recently.

Shadowdark: Shadowdark seems interested in brevity almost to a fault. Many rules are explained with the barest possible amount of information, often leaving the players and GM to parse out the implied results of what are in general basic rulings. This work against it at times if you are reading it from the perspective of one familiar with older D&D editions or the OSR movement, as Shadowdark is a modern game in OSR clothing, which means you can't assume anything with it. Shadowdark's communication style is so brief that it can be bothersome to people who prefer a more comprehensive or detailed explanation of mechanics, and also requires at times a lot of GM adjudication due to the lack of guidance it provides. This contrasts with the OSE rulesets in that OSE usually conveys to you the exact amount of information you need, while Shadowdark conveys the minimum amount of information....an important but subtle difference. 

On the other hand, Shadowdark's module design is heavily influenced by the Indie zinerpg scene, as is OSE. As a result, the actual modules for Shadowark are often using identical approaches to conveying necessary information in modest bites, and this leads to a sense that you could easily use Shadowdark modules with OSE and vice versa, just swapping out stat blocks as needed. 

Winner: OSE again, because it's friendly organization and "just the right amount of detail" approach to information makes it incredibly functional as a table resource. Shadowdark's brevity and bare-minimum approach to explaining anything will work best when you really are preferring a lot of interpretive freedom, though. It's almost a tie as I see it, but for my own personal tastes: OSE hands down.

Graphical Design:

OSE: OSE's art is an homage to B/X D&D and AD&D of the 80's. It's got a vaguely fetishistic approach to reimagining Erol Otus inspired artwork, and often relies on artists like Peter Mullen to accomplish this. I like it's approach more than with Dungeon Crawl Classics, which does something similar but often leans into a Retro 70's Kitsch aesthetic of a time that only existed in the doodles on the back of your High School textbooks (or so I imagine, as I was 10 years old in 1981 so I am definitely a product of the 80's rather than the 70's, when I was a little kid).

That said, OSE leans on a lot of art styles across many tomes, and some of the best and weirdest art manages a style that feels to me like "Erol Otus, if he was responsible for Adventure Time." So it's got a wide range within its deliberate aesthetic.

Shadowdark: Shadowdark is heavily focused on white-on-black aesthetics and a art style that feels divorced from B/X D&D and firmly rooted in AD&D 1st edition. It's art style is surprisingly uniform, across even third party publishers, to the extent that I think out of a couple dozen Shadowdark books I have, only one or two even bother to use real color at all....I haven't seen the 3PP design guide, but maybe there's a style guide somewhere they have to follow.

The good news on this is that Shadowdark books all look like they are part of a set; you can tell a Shadowdark book just by looking at it most times. The even better news is that a surprising amount of this art is actually really cool and evocative. The downside is I have also noticed a disproportionate amount of AI generated art in third party Shadowdark books, sometimes bad enough that it impacts my desire to even consider using the book (as is the case with Gammadark, the post-apocalyptic hack of Shadowdark, where the AI art is basically just "We have Warhammer 40K At Home" armored troopers in every other image). Luckily (so far) this does not seem to be an issue for the core books coming out of Arcane Library, though. 

Winner: Tough call! I will say Shadowdark for its stark white on black design aesthetic and imagery that feels very, very old school to me while still being quality art, but OSE is also very good at this, so its almost a tie. The third party content is more disappointing with Shadowdark, however, as too much AI generated art detracts from the books that use it, whereas that does not seem to be a problem with OSE's third party content at all for some reason.

Actual Play:

OSE: So I ran a bit of OSE a while back, a fun little campaign that ran for several levels and took advantage of one of my own campaign settings, mixed with some published modules, including maps from Trilemma Adventures (one of the greatest dungeon map books ever next to Dyson's works). It ran smoothly, it felt very old school even with using lots of third party content to "upgrade" it to some modern conventions in terms of the fantasy options available, and it was very fun. I don't think it felt terribly like the actual experience of playing AD&D I had back in the day, mainly because the core B/X emulation at the heart of OSE is just not as complex as the actual AD&D experience as it once was, but we all did have fun. I recall some of my players, far too enmeshed in modern game design, actually sat out the campaign for the most part. My own experience as a GM was pretty satisfying, though, and the play experience was not marred by 30-45 minutes of rules lawyering and lookup as tends to happen Every. Single. Session. with pathfinder 2E. Fun enough that I am now thinking about running a new OSE campaign soon, this time using The Panted Wastelands campaign setting.   

Shadowdark: I ran a short campaign last year.....a lengthy dungeon crawl, really, also set in my oldest campaign world (Lingusia), but not really using too much of it. We had fun, it was an entertaining system and its interesting quirks (including deciphering the level/XP process, the way magic casting works, and the disparity of power creep between the core book and sourcebooks) wasn't overly bothersome. It felt like a game system that wanted to just be played and get all the micromanagement out of the way, unless it involves light sources. It clearly works best for very dungeon-delve heavy gaming, although some soucebooks try to expand on wilderness delving and a few even dare to entertain using it as a "full featured" RPG though never enough to make one feel like Shadowdark would be a proper substitute for long term campaigning. I know its a style and feel preference, and Shadowdark may just be a little too simplistic for my own tastes; I know of at least two groups locally that play this game all the time, and abandoned DCC for it. For me....I kinda like it, but only maybe enough to crib some content from it for use with OSE, which really is the nicer overall product. That said....if I didn't feel like diving deep into the OSR experience and just wanted a fast play dungeon crawler for a session or two with tons of randomization, Shadowdark is pretty well the best option out there. In a sense that puts it next to Mork Borg, a system which I love running in spurts but never for long term campaigns. 

Winner: I have to give it narrowly to OSE as I really enjoyed running a couple campaigns with it and want to do more. But I also enjoyed running Shadowdark, even though the system itself often felt janky a times....but both are eminently playable. Because I prefer slightly more granularity in my OSR experience though, and also prefer the broader compatibility of OSE, I will give it this prize for being more playable.

Conclusion:

So, overall, for what I need at least I find OSE simply works better as a more well-rounded D&D OSR experience. Shadowdark works well as a pickup and play game for a session or three, but for me at least lacks the depth I need to feel like it is more versatile. OSE is on the edge of what I consider "acceptable" for versatility, but it is lovely because its close compatibility with older editions of D&D means if I really wanted to I could just hack the proficiency system from AD&D 2E into it without any fuss or muss, stick to descending AC for flavor, and grab a copy of The Night Below or Queen of the Demon Web Pits and run it pretty much as-is. I'd need to do some hacks on these modules to get them to play nice with Shadowdark, by contrast. As for adding rules from older editions, I could do that with Shadowdark, too.....but with OSE it feels like that is an option I can take if I want and its intended to work, while with Shadowdark it feels like I'd be defeating the point of the system's deliberate brevity, and also would probably find it easier to weld the 5E skill system onto Shadowdark instead of the AD&D proficiency system and kits and such. 

So! I'll talk various products on these over the next few weeks or so, including Shadowdark....which does have a lot of good sourcebooks out. I may be looking at them from the angle of "How can I get this to play nice with OSE?" though, so there ya' go!

One More Comment on Cold Eternity - And On Borrowing Villains from Real Life

 Something that came to mind while reading S.A. Barnes' Cold Eternity novel but which I forgot to include in my review was the fact that, for all of the shenanigans at the end involving Spoiler-Type stuff I won't mention here, the real villain of the novel is Zale Winfeld, the filthy rich entrepreneur who seeks to escape death. His presence in the novel is entirely, for the most part, posthumous in the sense that he's apparently been dead for a long time, and ironically never got his chance to be cryofrozen (allegedly) due to his own mishap. 

During the book, I kept thinking of this guy, and how there really does seem to be truth to the notion that sometimes having too much money does bring out the villain in you. Indeed, within Cold Eternity, the relationship hints between Zale and his son Aleyk are not dissimilar to the stories ciruclating around Bryan Johnson and his own son who gives blood so his father can pursue his own insane anti-aging schemes.

The novel I read after Cold Eternity (I'll blog about that one soon), The Haar by David Sodergren, shined a light on the fact that more and more contemporary horror is borrowing, rather easily, like low-hanging fruit, from the contemporary villains of our age, which in turns reminded me that the same scenario seemed true in Cold Eternity, where the real culprit behind everyone's suffering was yet another filthy rich madman who subjects everyone to his own villainous ministrations; and his buddy Karl, of course, who is effectively a modern day camp follower. 

On the one hand, it would be fun to see more unique villainy in such novels.....but it is both appropriate, I suppose, and disturbing just how easily recent novels can simply extract ready made villains cut from the cloth of real life to fill out their pages. Ah, what a horrifying timeline we live in!

Book Review: Cold Eternity by S.A. Barnes

 

Cold Eternity by S.A. Barnes (B&N) (Amazon)

Fair disclosure: I started reading Cold Eternity earlier last year, but did so in ebook format and got about nine chapters in reading a bit here and there before setting it down and forgetting about it, as can often happen with ebooks, which just feel more ephemeral than their bound matter counterparts. Cut to January 2026 and I spotted a hardcover in the local book store which I decided to snag (along with a copy of the newly in print There is no Antimimetics Division, about which I shall write more later). For reasons I can't quite put my finger on I have a habit of vacillating between trying to go full ebook on my reading, followed by lengthy periods in which I find it impossible to pick up an ereader and just read actual books. 

As it happens, snagging Cold Eternity in hardcover format was what I needed, and I plowed through it over the last two weeks. It's around a 6-8 hour read, and the third book in S.A. Barnes' science fiction horror novel series. I have not yet read her prior to novels in this set, but have picked them up and plan to do so (so consider that obvious praise for Cold Eternity that it motivated me to get her other books).

In brief, the core premise of Cold Eternity would make a great Mothership campaign: our protagonist, who narrates the story from her perspective, is a woman named Katarina who is on the run following a bad fall from grace in the political scene of a setting that organically grows with her narration, a future society which has colonized the solar system and is now run by a parliamentary agglomeration of various colonies. She was wrapped up in some sleazy political manipulation, effectively an idealist used as a pawn, and then ordered to lay low while waiting for the inquiry to pass when the dealings are exposed. A scary encounter with a thug motivates her to get off the EnExx17 station near Enceladus entirely, and she finds a off-the-books job offer from a mysterious guy named Kurt who needs cheap and desperate help.

The job, it turns out, is on an ancient starship called the Elysian Fields, a relic vessel from a century earlier that was initially started as part of a grand project to study life extension through cryogenics, and ended up being a mausoleum in space when the technology failed to generate results. For a while it was operated as a tourist trap to generate revenue, recently enough for Katarina to remember visiting it as a child. The ship's public concourse was turned into a gaudy tourist trap advertising the mysterious family behind the construction of the ship, the Winfelds, including elder Zale and his desire for immortality, and his three children who all died in a shuttle accident and were then "immortalized" as holographic constructs. In the intervening years the ship apparently wound down its tourist operation and was moved to maintenance mode, with the enigmatic technician Karl on board to keep things running smoothly.

Katarina takes a shuttle to the Elysian Fields after an ominous warning from the bartender where her remote interview for the job took place, suggesting others have been hired by Karl and none of them have ever come back to the station. From here, she quickly learns the bizarre routine of monitoring the accessible floors of the ship (upper and lower decks are barred from her by Karl) and a weird requirement for her to push a button every three hours to "check in with the board," something Karl says he has no time for due to his working on ship repairs. She still hasn't met Karl, who remains in the guts of the ship somewhere making a constant racket.

The story moves into "haunted house" territory with the Elysian Fields very much being a true mausoleum in space, and Katarina begins to encounter oddities, including a video feed she was convinced showed some sort of sickly looking person crawling on the floor. As the story progresses, she deals with evidence of prior employees with superstitious tendencies, stranger noises, eerier hallucinations caused by her sleep deprivation due to the button pressing schedule, and then the holograms of the children of the Winfelds begin to manifest in their designated performance auditorium, speaking to her.

I won't dive any further without a spoiler warning, but will say that about 90% of the intense action this story is end-loaded into the last 80 or so pages. It also takes a weird and interesting turn, and there's a single chapter in particular which effectively infodumps everything that is going on. There is a moment where the shift goes from slow, creepy haunted spaceship story with questions about the sanity of the narrator to "action movie mode" with a plot twist that is so far out of left field that I started to wonder if maybe Barnes had originally envisioned a much slower, more methodical storyline and someone, an editor maybe, advised her to pick up the pace a bit.

So, if you would like to read an interesting book with a lot of ambient world-building that does a great job at a gothic haunted house slow-burn story but on a spaceship (at least for the first 80% of the book) then this is a must-read. The ending is pretty exciting, even though it does raise many, many questions. Overall I enjoyed it enough to immediately seek out Barnes' other two scifi horror novels, and I feel that the story is worthy of inspiration for a future Mothership campaign, too. Solid A!

So now for the Spoiler Warning. You have been warned!!! Go read the book first, then return here.

The late-game reveal in the book involves discovering that the ship has been used for the last century or two by Zale Winfeld as his laboratory for solving death. He manipulated his children into serving him, except for his eldest son Aleyk, who he later forced into submission by cryogenically freezing and uploading their minds into an AI system. Some of the details on why he did what he did to them are a tad bit sketchy, I guess it was mainly so he could have them around for company. What Zale did to himself, though was much more extreme: he apparently got into the occult, discovered an ancient cult which practiced possession, and figured out how to get possessed by something akin to a demon, though defined in the story as potentially an alien visitor from thousands of years ago. The exact details are vague, and just off kilter enough that I was left wondering why the explanation of his nature wasn't attributed to nanotechnology, cybernetics or something more grounded in regular scifi; to put it simply, the monster that Zale turned into, assuming he found the beast or its parasitic remnants on earth, would have had a history that is hard to shake, especially given how difficult it is to kill once the thing is fully revealed.

The story tries to wrap up in a very cinema-action style way both Katarina's plight on the ship with the Zale (and Karl) plotline, but also tried to put a bow on her flight from the political mess she was involved in. The net result does leave one feeling like it was all tacitly resolved, but I really felt like maybe, just maybe it was not the original intended ending of this book.....or maybe Barnes' free associates when she is writing? 

So some thoughts on what the real ending could have been: my first thought for much of the book was that it was going to eventually be revealed that it was a rogue AI causing problems (Svalbard). Maybe the AI constructs of the kids were real, and maybe Zale was still around (but cybernetically enhanced), but I was pretty sure the reason Karl never appeared in person was because his feeds were AI generated. The truth in the end was of course Karl was so cybered out he was grotesque to behold, but it felt like an interesting miss here. Maybe the intent was to imply "AI is doing all this" as a feint, but to then move to "occult research leading to lost alien presence on Earth," honestly felt like an even bigger reach to me. 

Still, it was a fun book, and the ending holds well enough even though the tonal shift to insane gore-drenched ending felt maybe a bit forced, but I think maybe if the book had a bit more evenly spread out action and was able to find ways for Katarina to slowly piece together the mystery over time rather than info dump from Aleyk's AI construct toward the end, it might have felt like the explosive ending was a bit more earned. I guess what I am saying is, for better or worse, the reason Resident Evil type games are filled with scientists and madmen who like to journal everything is so your character can find this stuff and piece together what is going on. If Katarina had found more clues and information over the course of the first 200 pages of the book then I think the surprise payoff at the end would have been more impressive. Who knows, maybe the reference to the occult ceremony and the mysterious cave (which she does find the holographic depiction of, but without context or clues) are the basis for other future stories....or maybe something referenced in prior novels? I don't yet know, but will be reading her other works next.

A couple other odd comments: 

1. If Katarina was 12ish when she visited the Elysian Fields, and we assume she's 30-35 now, then it means that the ship was receiving regular visitors within just the last 20 years. But the transition of Zale to possessed host for the demon-alien happened as a precursor to the ship's founding more than a century (or two) ago.....so what changed that led to the ship being rapidly decommissioned as a tourist trap and put in maintenance mode? Lots of questions like these go unanswered since the book is told exclusively through the perspective of Katarina. 

2. Karl's backstory is another late reveal. All of Karl feels vaguely forced. It would have been interesting if Katarina had been able to learn more about Karl sooner, so that when his big reveal does happen it is more shocking. As it stands, we learn all the info on Karl at once, so the only surprise was that he was, in fact, a real person and not an AI construct by Svalbard.

3. Katarina's political abuser, Niina, conveniently shows up at the end with the away team. I think (but correct me if I am misunderstanding) they were following the ship all along.....but why? It does sort of feel like the subplot of the political snafu that drove Katarina underground was growing as the story progressed, and what it felt like in the first couple chapters feels distinctly different from the last few chapters. Maybe a rewrite to align the eventual ending with the beginning might have helped this feel a little better in terms of continuity? Although I do feel like the book feels like its story was evolving as written, it holds together well enough for me to wish that these bits and pieces had been maybe re-evaluated just a bit so that the pay off and reveals at the end of the story feel more properly aligned with the setup.

Either way, a good read, well worth it.