The B/X D&D Tipping Point

 I spent a fair amount of time accruing both Old-School Essentials books and shadowdark books over the last couple years, and vascillating between which system I generally preferred. OSE because it is more of an emulator? Shadowdark because it is more of a focused modern experienced in retro sheep's clothing? OSE because it's got a blend of B/X D&D and AD&D mechanical elements, or Shadowdark which is brutally honest in its desire to focus on dungeon crawling and loot acquisition? OSE for its quaint retro-graphical aesthetic that suggests artists influenced by Erol Otus, or Shadowdark with its stark black.white/silver design ethos that reminds me of those full-page black and white splash images in the AD&D manuals?

Of course, in the midst of this I managed to almost completely rekindle my AD&D 1E collection, thanks to a lucky find at a game store out in Roswell. That alone was enough to get me mulling over pulling off a classic AD&D style campgin, but also somehow not quite as motivating as I might have imagined. There was a piece of the puzzle missing for me....and last month Wizard of the Coast finally completed that puzzle with a print on demand edition of the Basic D&D book, with the Erol Otus cover. They Expert set was already available, but hard to use that without the Basic set, you know? And finding halfway decent copies of either book for less than an arm and a leg on Ebay is hard to do these days.

So now I have the proper B/X D&D set, and this is what I was missing. While I did favor AD&D 1E back in the day for the more flexible character options, I actually consulted with the B/X rulesets, a lot....like, all the time, because when the DMG or PHB was proving to be inscrutible to me young gamer mind (this is specifically the time when I was around 10 years old to about 14) the B/X rules allowed for simple clarity. My favorite recollection on this was combat, starting with initiative and surprise. Clearly and simply explained in B/X, a sharp contrast from the nightmare exposition that Gygax laid like a trap for the unwary in the DMG. 

Sure, we noticed all the differences in the two systems, but back then chalked that up to being "here's the basic/expert version of the rules....there's the advanced version of the rules....mix and match until you get something that works and everyone understands." One thing I did not do back then was run either B/X or AD&D in pure form, at least not until I was high school age (around 15 and up) when I by that time was familiar with more complex systems, and began to study AD&D and B/X for what they were as unique games rather than complimentary sets. By that time I was playing Palladium Fantasy, Runequest, Tunnels & Trolls and even eventually GURPS 1E with more regularity. In my fanzine publishing days I had a spurt of interest in treating B/X D&D similarly to T&T, concocting material for the game as written, including solo adventures. It was a fun exercise in working within the boundaries of a system rather than finding ways to break it. During this time and right up through my college years I continued to buy B/X (and later bECMI) sourcebooks and modules, even if I mostly used them with AD&D 2E by then.

Anyway, fast forward 35 or so years to the present, and my interest in B/X D&D is rekindled with the new print on demand edition. It's a compelling third contender in the arena where the young whippersnappers OSE and Shadowdark have been duking it out. For one thing, a lot of the material I have on my shelves aimed at either OSE, Labyrinth Lord or other B/X retroclones is pretty compatible with original B/X. For another thing, a shocking amount of classic B/X material has made its way back into POD, meaning I have also managed to begin restoring my collection of modules, including many I never managed to snag back in the day.

This is not an unusual thing for me; I have a habit of "rediscovering" B/X every few years and looking at it on its own merits, a sort of "what could have been" had I not dived into AD&D instead of B/X early on. My entire Pergerron, the River Kingdoms of Anansis campaign setting actually started as a creative exercise in desiging a campaign which assumed only the character options, magic and monsters of B/X and soure books were available for the world design.* Now I am feeling that creative urge to do something new within the boundaries of B/X again....but this time I am older, have less time, and am growing more fussy with overly rules-laden systems which is leading me to appreciate the more streamlined qualities of B/X even more. We shall see! I have ideas.....I will likely post them as they come here. This new venture may or may not cannibalize from OSE and Shadowdark. 

*Technically the first shot of Pergerron started in Magic World, but then became the basis for the B/X iteration. Now Pergerron is a weird D&D 5E/Cthulhu hybrid mashup, so is distinctly its own thing.

Cozy Gaming - Obojima, Land of Eem and Other Curiosities

 The idea of Cozy Gaming is a phenomenon which I have seen crop up in the domain of video games, and can cover games ranging from Stardew Valley to Animal Crossing. They originally sprang out of what I think was arguably a more child-age focused genre of game, designed to provide a game experience to kids which wouldn't horrify parents by focusing on crafting, farming, talking to NPCs and solving non-violent quests and stuff. Over the last twenty years this genre has sprung whole cloth into its own sort of thing. 

Where once video games were informed by tabletop RPGs, now the reverse is true. Cozy gaming experiences in the tabletop scene are springing up, and while I have as a rule of thumb mostly ignored this genre (being that one who likes Call of Cthulhu, Mork Borg and other skittery nightmares on my shelf) I have made an exception for two games of note: Land of Eem and Obojima.

Land of Eem is based on some juvenile graphic novels about a skeleton bard trying to make his way through the eponymous Lands of Eem; beyond the graphic novels you can use the game to explore a rather fabulous setting that reminds me of that Adventure Time cartoon (a show which seemed rather fun, albeit coming out waaaay too many years too late for me to enjoy it meaningfully). Obojima is a slightly different take on cozy gaming, instead being a sort of world/universe inspired heavily by Studo Jibli anime, movies which I know a lot of people really love (and which I have seen none of except for Nausicaa Valley of the Wind). It presents a land far in the future, where relic technology of a bygone age is scattered about in a pastoral land overlapping the spirit world. It's many denizens are a blend of natural and supernatural, and there aren't too many high stakes problems going on.

I have one or two other games that may or may not count as "cozy gaming" depending on how you stretch the definition. For example, one might look at Tales from the Loop and The Electric State to be somewhat cozy gaming adjacent, insofar as they both depict semi-post-apocalyptic lands where bad things happened, then as a side effect of this great and troubling collapse things got a lot calmer, and then also a lot more interesting. 

A key element of these games seems to be an emphasis on exploration and low stakes. Exploration in that you have weird locales and people/creatures/robots/things to meet and talk to (having more, rather than fewer opportunities to talk to things is pretty key), and that even if the atmosphere is eerie and weird, it is also simultaneously relaxing or at least not nerve wracking (so nothing like Alien RPG or Call of Cthulhu, the diametric opposite the cozy gaming genre). Likewise, low stakes in that you are not likely ever going to need to save the universe, fight a monstrous demon horde, or protect the town from certain doom.....although I suppose creative use of the genre can allow for anything, with he right context; but the point being that you are far more likely in a cozy game setting to be protecting a local fishing pond, finding new ingredients for a potion, making friends with strange spirits or having a wild adventure with the legendary Mister Toad than anything else.

Anyway.....this is a long way of saying I picked up Obojima and while I am currently reading through it I may write more soon, especially if I can convince my old group to give it a try.