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We talk about the vibrancy of the #osr as a blogging scene but there's increasing amounts of content out there aimed at people who are looking to start selling their own pdfs and that is not a great sign.
I definitely feel as though this year's bloggies were a bit of a mask-off moment as people spent the entire month log-rolling old wine into new bottles.
Just this morning someone published a 'how to do a dungeon crawl' post and it feels like we're at the "they're selling hippie wigs in Woolworths" stage.
@Taskerland We want the finest PDFs known to humanity, we want them here and we want them AI generated.
@Taskerland I saw someone bemoaning the loss of vibrancy in the OSR elsewhere and I wonder what a fully vibrant scene looks like? What are we missing? More adventures? Feels like we have plenty of systems...
@xaosseed As anb example of falling levels of cultural energy, consider that Basic Fantasy was put online for free and nearly 20 years later people are still recommending Black Apple Brugh and Morgansfort.
Putting stuff up for free shows a level of faith in the scene's capacity to reward good work that has now almost completely dried up. Nowadays it's nothing but expensive crowdfunding initiatives yielding PDFs that don't even make it to copper sales.
@Taskerland the classics are always going to be the classics even if great new stuff comes out - what surprises me is the multiple takes *this week* about how the vibrancy of the scene is dead
I feel like new and interesting things cross my feed each week - certainly not 'nothing but' crowdfunding - I am curious what is felt to be missing?
@xaosseed I think cultural health is reflected in the willingness to confront boundaries...
Meanwghile, nobody seems to have much interest in adventure design beyond dungeons and introductory 'how do I design mysteries' stuff.
There's also been a real reluctance to move beyond the limited aesthetic range of grimdark, fairytales, and gonzo.
By and large, boundaries do not get confronted and when someone does try to do something a bit different, they tend to get ignored.
@Taskerland @xaosseed I would like to see some adventure design around modern adventuring. Urban magic type settings and the like.
Though there are games in this time period, now that I think about it. They tend to be PBTA, at first think.
@Da_Gut @Taskerland for me the core aspect of that is city building tools and I have seen some very nice ones of those plus a few approach tweaks like your key resource is time
Dresden Files did a decent stab at this, no? For that matter, we basically did this with VtM back in the day. Sabbat 1920s. Wasn't subtle.
@xaosseed @Taskerland those are world building, not adventure design.
Taking note of TV and movies might be a better way of research. Schitt’s creek had texting, but almost no phone calls for example.
Many “modern” games are written before cell phones were ubiquitous, for example
@xaosseed @Da_Gut I view that as part of the broader project of reclaiming old mechanics and the OSR has been doing City Adventures for a while now. Vornheim came out in 2011.
I'm surprised at how little interest there is in exploring stuff like Night's Dark Terror. At this point, I'd argue that the OSR is more conservative than TSR was back in the day.
@xaosseed @Taskerland Dresden files was a good RPG. I no longer have a copy since I sold my books back before I moved to Maine. I made a healthy profit off of those three books too.
@Taskerland hmm. I’m still not sure what the limits of OSR are….
I’m mostly interested in Cypher system myself, which isn’t OSR. But they have a Magnus Archives campaign being published, gunslinger knights on motorcycles sourcebook about to ship, and something else.
I don’t follow much, being broke at the moment. And it’s a bad world not to have a bit of buffer in under present circumstances.
Mothership has a new box set recently (early 24 I think?)
Vazh and I have talked about this before and there is a real culture of *assuming* you want to run a side hustle on your gaming stuff. I get asked all the time where I sell props and maps and stuff, and it baffles people I don't. I don't know if that pushes people into it as a social force, or the blogs all imply that everyone does it?
@Taskerland osr is largely dead as a community but REALLY starting to pick up cache as a marketing term and it's about to get deeply "time of monsters" now that there's a tiny amount of money to be made
@zozo It'll be interesting to see how it plays out over the next year, particularly as 5e seems to be drying up.
@Taskerland it's gonna be a fun 18 months if you like watching heartbreakers fail financially
@zozo I suspect the long tail will shorten before we get to the higher-profile failures but there is a real loss of energy compared to even last year.