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!

My Nostalgia Sweet Spot: 1989

I have discovered, at last, where I think my nostalgia sweet spot lies: 1989. Probably, more specifically, 1988 to around 1992, but definitely in that zone. Top on my list of recent nostalgia finds is a vintage, almost mint condition copy of the 1989 original (not revised) version of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition Dungeon Master Guide. The AD&D 2nd edition core books from 1989 are  notorious for having been fairly flimsy,* and it is not difficult to find one with tattered corners, an eroded spine or any other number of blemishes and issues, but it is extremely hard to find one that looks like it just came off the shelf at the game store, and the DMG that just showed up in the mail looks exactly like that....not even any page yellowing! Insane. 

I'm also waiting on a Player's Handbook, also from 1989, which from the images looks to be fairly intact (some corner issues but they look minor). I have a later bound Monstrous Compendium on the way, but I'm not even trying to find one of the 1989 binders filled with three-ring-punched monster sheets. It was a well-intentioned by terrible idea then, and finding those old loose-leaf folios for the original MC is hard. I still have some from back in the day (Spelljammer), but so few have survived to the present.

All this is happening because after realizing that my recent enjoyment at once again playing (and rekindling) my D&D 3.5 collection didn't so much spark nostalgia as it demonstrated that the 3rd edition rules hold up exceedingly well even in today's era of games that are inspired to heavily simplify from their predecessor. If you want crunchier mechanics and a sense of meaty stakes in your game, 3rd edition in its various forms delivers quite nicely.

In realizing that the nostalgia bug didn't lie there, I realized that it did, for me at least, lie with AD&D 2nd edition, but also very specifically those books which came out in 1989. That particular style of tome, with the mixture of classic late 80's fantasy art, woodblock-style images, and an aesthetic that was both evolved for its time and already curiously quaint just a few years later makes these books stand out to me. It was the edition my 1989 gaming group pleaded with me to purchase and run after they had graciously put up with a year of SPI's Dragon Quest and Avalon Hill's version of Runequest.** I still remember my first AD&D 2E campaign in great detail and the general enthusiasm of both myself and the group has been hard to replicate ever since.

When in the mid-nineties they released revised versions of the books, followed by the Player's Options series (an effort to reconcile dozens of other splatbooks published for AD&D by TSR), the style of art changed to something which, while interesting, just didn't evoke "D&D' for me in a manner consistent with how I felt the original 2E tomes did. It felt off, but hard to say precisely how since the look is nice....but I had grown accustomed to the older style of presentation.

Anyway, it turns out that yeah, I totally enjoy seeing intact, decent copies of tomes from this era again and reminiscing about the great adventures I had. It's part of the missing nostalgia equation, chiefly because my earliest gaming memories with D&D B/X and AD&D 1E are a mixture of interest punctuated with various compounding issues: the fact that for most of the 80's my opportunities to game were sometimes far and few between, the fact that I moved rapidly from AD&D (which was at times monolithically obscure in its design for a kid of age 10-13 when I was running my approximation of it) and started exploring dozens of other games on the market at the time, and the fact that a great deal of my time investment in gaming in the early and mid-eighties was spent writing fanzine content, going to conventions and playing games like Tunnels & Trolls, Dragon Quest, Palladium Fantasy, Runequest and Call of Cthulhu. AD&D 1E was replaced at various times by its many other contemporaries, and when you look at my classic campaign setting (Keepers of Lingusia) carefully, you can see the grains of other games and where they made their mark: Blackwell (a city on the map in RQ2) was once in the deep north on my game map, where broo-like beastmen roam free; vyrkasha wolven populate the Northern Wilderness thanks to Palladium, the great city of the plains, Karan, was my cypher for Khazan, etc. etc.

So for me, my campaign world that started in AD&D 1E in 1981ish didn't fully bloom and return to the fold until 1989 when I finally caved in and decided maybe AD&D 2E made the game something I would like to revisit. And it sure did....with some caveats (which included me immediately writing up new stat blocks for all the missing demons). That first campaign during the fall/winter semester set the pace for all my gaming going forward through about 1995, in which I structured each AD&D campaign around the length of the semester, since I never knew if I would have the same players in time for the campaign the semester following. In this manner I got quite used to a story structure that would last around 10-15 game sessions, with pauses during mid-terms and finals. It was a good approach.

Because of the turbulent and weird years of my youth, I also have what I would describe as "more unpleasant memories than good ones" from 1980 to 1988 or thereabouts. AD&D 2E arrived in my life at a time when that trend reversed, dramatically, for a time. From the year I went to college and on I had more control over my own destiny, and while there were plenty of bumps to be had in the road of time, it is indubitable that I had both more control and more freedom to compensate for it. Amidst all of this I had a handful of games, AD&D 2E in the lead, which were my key go-to forms of entertainment. I ran AD&D 2E every week, pretty much, for all of the 90's. And in those earlier days during my college years I also leaned hard on games such as Cyberpunk 2020, MegaTravller, Dark Conspiracy, DC Heroes, GURPS and Call of Cthulhu. 

It's harder to find serious nostalgia for Call of Cthulhu, GURPS and Traveller, since I never stopped playing those games. But for AD&D 2E, I very much took a hard stop on it when D&D 3rd edition came out, which was a serious revision to the game, enough so to argue that it was an entirely new and different game system. AD&D as a result isn't just an archaic set of mechanics, it's a specific thing that I did for a specific period of time and then just....stopped.

Anyway, no idea if I will try running it again (though the notion is being tossed around and the group seems receptive), but I sure am enjoying re-collecting those original books from 1989.  

* I still have my original DMG, for example, which is held together by duct tape.

** Which means yes, I am shopping around for the old Dragon Quest and Avalon Hill Runequest books on this nostalgia kicks (and Palladium Fantasy 1E), but I'm not quite willing to pay out the premium prices copies of these books in good condition command.

Baldur's Gate Collection on the Nintendo Switch

This week Beamdog Software, responsible for the enhanced editions of beloved Obsidian classics Baldur's Gate I and II, Icewind Dale and Planescape: Torment releases console editions of all the classic AD&D 2nd edition-powered RPGs from roughly 1998-2000, easily some of the best and most innovative RPGs for their day, and still some of the best iterations of D&D today, as well as shockingly good to enjoy even now, as long as you're in to isometric RPGs.

If you don't know and don't feel like googling it, isometric RPGs are effectively "top down perspective" games which in this case happen to be RPGs; there are lots of other isometric games out there, but this subgenre focuses on elements with a bit of more conventional CRPG design mixed with real time strategy and turn-based combat. For their time, the Obsidian AD&D game titles were well regarded for how they allowed you to play in real time and pause when things got too interesting or required your intervention....which was often a lot. Back when I first played these games, I set the parameters for when the game paused to "most situations" by default...I liked keeping careful control back then.

Thankfully that level of granularity works in my favor these days, as I prefer less control more than anything. The new versions of these games aren't really "new" anymore, either....and odds are if you lurk in blogs like this you already have played these games or own one on some form of device in the last decade or so; the enhanced editions and originals have been available on PC in digital format as well as tablet for some time now. Moving them ton consoles is a brilliant move, though; Beamdog had to design the ports with a controller in mind, and anyone who has seen how Pillars of Eternity and Divinity II: Original Sin handled this know that the current conversion method actually makes for a better, more intuitive set of controls than you get on a mouse an keyboard. Take that, PC master race!

Ahem....so the console ports I picked up are on Switch, which adapts the resolution of text appropriately and makes it possible to play handheld and still read it (old gamers may still need reading glasses). The game on a TV looks fine, but maybe not as good as I can experience on 4K resolution through my GOG edition, but honestly? I'm here for the ridiculously intuitive controller setup.

I won't bother reviewing the games beyond mentioning that a few hours in to Baldur's Gate and it all runs quite well. I'll try the others out as well, soon as I can find time (yes, somehow I found the money to grab them but time....time is indeed precious...!) Baldur's Gate is proving to be the experience I remember from my multiple prior playthroughs (fair disclosure: I've only beaten the original once) and I actually feel emboldened by the superior controls and portability that I may at last get to replay Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale as well as play and finish for the first time Baldur's Gate II and Planescape: Torment. Yes, you read that right; I have not played either of the latter two games; I had even less time in the late 90s'/early 00's for computer gaming and a cruddy Mac for my computer, so my options were slim! But luckily thanks to these new ports I think it is at last time to make some room on my schedule.

AD&D 1E Players Handbook now on dndclassics.com

This is it....the AD&D rulebooks for 1st edition are starting to appear on dndclassics.com. the Player's Handbook is now up, so the DMG and MM must not be far behind.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: this is a very good time to be a fan of the classic editions of D&D.

Now....will they put up the OD&D reprint in PDF eventually? That would be cool.

Anyway, in case you didn't know it, you can already find the Fiend Folio, Monster Manual II, Manual of the Planes, Deities and Demigods, Wilderness Survival Guide, Greyhawk Adventures and Oriental Adventures in PDF on dndclasssics. So....once they get the DMG and MM up, along with Dungeon Survival Guide and Arcana Evolved I think all of the 1E hardbacks will be available in PDF format.

FOLLOW UP: It's a clean, fully-book-marked PDF, very readable, of the reprint version of the book (as expected from the cover above). It's also a tiny file, under 6 MB in size...I picked up the L series modules while I was at it (Secret of Bone Hill and its two follow-ups) and some of those were several times larger in size...go figure.