Ten Commandments of the OSR...

(1) The OSR is an attempt to preserve, promote, and/or revive old-school games.  

(2) Its aims can be met by playing these early games, but also by publishing content under the Open Gaming License or developing original systems in this style.  

(3) There's nothing about seeking to preserve, promote, and/or revive old-school games that suggests (much less requires) any particular political, religious, or social agenda.

(4) The fact that some people in the OSR behave badly says nothing about the OSR as a whole.  Some are good, others bad; but all of them can like older games.

(5) If you want a positive, welcoming OSR, be a positive, welcoming person.  Splitting off into ideologically pure communities just might be the worst possible way to achieve this.

(6) We desperately need values, but we'll have to look beyond the OSR to find them; and when we do, shouldn't they apply to everything and not just our gaming?

(7) As long as people remain fascinated by older games, the OSR will never die.

(8) Things like Sword Dream and The Inglorious OSR are at best subsets of the OSR; and far from signalling the death of the movement, they speak to its diversity. 

(9) The OSR has no leaders.  Some are louder and more vocal, but they can only speak for themselves (and that includes yours truly).  Feel free to add your voice to the mix.  

(10) If you've fled the OSR only to run your weekly OD&D game, you haven't escaped the movement at all.  Indeed, you've aided it's sole purpose.  Long live the OSR!

On the Slow Death of Shock...

Okay, so James Raggi, shock maestro of the OSR, offered a clever play on the whole Kids on Bikes game with Kids on Pikes.  Yes, the cover of his GenCon catalog depicts dead children impaled on pikes, seemingly for our amusement.  I've seen worse in real life, and while I find it distasteful in the extreme, I'm not clamoring for censorship.  These things inevitably correct themselves, and James isn't helping himself.  I've never played his game, and the gross marketing tactics don't communicate anything informational.

Dead kids bleeding on wooden pikes!  Will the ideas never cease?  Seriously though, this latest non-controversy does at least invite a conversation about how we're supposed to view violence in games where the whole point is to stick pointy things into others and take their money.  How do we enjoy this and have any issue with Kids on Pikes?    

Birth, sex, and death are part of the human condition and impossible to ignore.  If you’re reading this paragraph, you were born.  And if you aren’t having sex now, the smart money says you’re the product of it (and very likely seeking your next encounter).  Our desire to survive and reproduce is indelibly hardwired, so much so that we omit these things from our narratives to our peril and to the detriment of the concepts we hope to explore...

I get it.  I'm not some prude who wants to play tea party.  Orcs pillage the countryside, slaughtering all in their path.  Lust reduces men to quivering jelly, makes them the lovers of demons (or maybe their own sisters in Caligula's case) and worse yet, predators of the topical sort who populate our news cycles all too often.  Indeed, these realities elevate our fiction and our games, and their omission would suck the humanity out of our efforts and leave a huge, unsatisfying hole in its wake.  Candyland doesn't interest me.

But that's the rub, isn't it?  When do our narratives go from being stories about humanity which just happen to involve death and sex, even if prominently, and when do they become death and sex for its own sake divorced from any context?  This distinction matters...    

So first, let's partition sex and violence.  Sex between consenting adults is nothing to oppose or censor so long as it's basically responsible and hurts no one.  But once it becomes non-consensual it devolves into violence.  And let's extricate death because this, in and of itself, is the natural end of our cycle, however painful it can be to the survivors.  We can disentangle these things and distill that which any considerate human should rightly reject...

Namely, the suffering of others as an end unto itself and offered up as entertainment or a clever marketing strategy.  And this is why I'm ultimately turned off by Kids on Pikes.   

Pain and suffering are things that happen in our narratives.  That doesn't mean we should find them cool or entertaining for their own sake.  Now I totally get that the grindhouse genre playfully exploits blood-spattering gore.  It's basically dark humor, and I was raised on the excellent Creepy and Eerie horror comics of the 1970s.  But these stories were surprisingly moralistic in their approach and never suggested that we should enjoy, much less find humor, in the suffering of helpless innocents, as horrific as they could sometimes be...

Feel free to disagree.  Free country.  For fans of Raggi's work, it's entirely consistent with an unbroken trend and maybe even good marketing.  But for adult gamers, human suffering shouldn't be amusing or diversionary fare.  Not when real children die in depressing numbers every day.  I don't care for (most) Quentin Tarantino movies because only a pampered and protected millionaire would find graphic suffering amusing*.  Again, that's just me.

There's no easy way to partition the fact of violence and the enjoyment of it, especially when the lines are so easily blurred.  We're rightly horrified at actual violence against children, including James Raggi (who obviously doesn't condone it), while simultaneously devouring splatter flicks.  It's the whole duality of man thing.  But live long enough and see enough actual suffering firsthand, and maybe the smile fades a little and we move on; and this is the slow and inevitable "death" of shock.  These tactics will eat themselves alive...

*From Dusk til Dawn and Pulp Fiction were decent, but the victims sort of had it coming!   

Was Google+ Gaming's Camelot?

Okay, so it's been a little over a month since Google+ died (at least for the gaming community), although most of us escaped to new online homes well before the proverbial axes fell and our heads hit the basket.  But G+ was such a vital organ of the hobby, a landscape where it truly thrived, that nothing like mere escape could ease the effects of its passing.  And, not surprisingly, it's taken some time for me to process...

First off, Google+ was the social media platform of a media giant; so being there felt something like having our own cable network.  We were sending (and receiving) across an immense public sphere.  Of course, this wasn't a universal sentiment or our beloved G+ would still be; but for those of us in the tabletop world it felt like we were broadcasting to a substantial chunk of the hobby, because we almost certainly were. 

Imagine being in Time's Square on New Year's Eve.  More on that bit later...

But its reach, even among the gaming set, went far beyond the hobby - and tabletop enthusiasts weren't the only ones using the platform.  Its home feed could be a window on the world (remember that 90s promise?) depending on what you followed.  Mine was a motley assortment of news, tabletop gaming, and music.  From the tragic death of Tom Petty to the 2016 presidential election, Google+ kept me in the know.  I get that all social media makes this possible; but G+ did it on a bigger scale, or so it seemed.

Google+, for all its supposed failures, succeeded at being an immense and public facing phenomenon, the social-media equivalent of a personal cable network.  Now I can see legions of online types waiting to quote figures and demonstrate where I'm objectively wrong about (insert _______ here).  But this post is about my feelings and experiences with the platform, something largely immune to objective analysis, even if I'm wrong.

But perhaps the best way to express the experience of Google+ is to look at what happened in the wake of its demise.  At first everyone pitched their best alternative and made for the escape pods.  And it's not like there wasn't lots to choose from.  But quite a few of us made it MeWe, including those who didn't originally want to go.  The migration was big enough that the new landlords had to make accommodations, which speaks well for them, but also to the enormity of the move itself.  And it absorbed only some of the refugees!

MeWe isn't a wealthy tech giant, and its passion for privacy means that it's more intimate (and insular) than Google+ ever was.  That's a two-edged sword.  My circles are smaller, but also stocked with authentic friends, something I'm immensely grateful for.  The friendships started on Google+ were the most valuable things there.  But as a person who enjoys feeling connected to a larger public, I miss the sheer reach of my former home and its "one stop shopping" atmosphere, which brings us back to the whole New Year's analogy...

So it's New Year's Eve in Time's Square.  People are everywhere, and it's easy to get whipped up by the crowd.  It's a noisy, festive event; and if you're standing in the right place at the right time, you just might show up on TV.  But your friends are there too, forming intimate little clusters, familiar eddies in a fast-moving stream.  MeWe is more like a small gathering in a friend's apartment - and there's nothing wrong with that.  

But Google+ was a veritable Camelot for tabletop gamers.  A massive, thriving kingdom that spoke to the public at large.  It benefited greatly from the sheer number of voices and the ease of which new ideas and products could be disseminated.  Bloggers and publishers alike could spread their respective wings and reach an impressive audience.  This was good for the game publishers, obviously; but ours is a hobby that needs new products as well as fresh ideas, and Google+ absolutely enabled this unprecedented creative economy...

Which is to say: the Google+ era was special, and Robyn and I are both immensely glad for the five years we got to be part of it.  And we've held on to the best parts...

I don't say this because it's over, but because it's in recovery.  There's no squelching the creative urge, and that goes double for gaming.  The same voices that made Google+ such a great community are alive and well in new online homes.  History shows us that kingdoms don't just fall.  They also rise from the ashes.  For a decent chunk of us, MeWe could be a pit stop along the way or the start of a new golden age.  History (and gaming) goes on...  

Lightning Strikes In the Games We Play (and Some Real-World Safety Advice)...

Lightning spells are ubiquitous in gaming, and it isn't hard to understand why.  There's something decidedly elemental about these powerful (and visually impressive) displays of nature's fury.  And given that the ancients saw lightning as a sign of divine displeasure, electrical bolts from the heavens, it certainly feels at home in worlds where magic works and the many gods are real.  Electrocution is deadly, but the ability to wield lightning is highly sought after by warriors (Thor's hammer) and wizards alike... 

But have we ever taken the time to quantify the staggering power of lightning?

We're not talking dice here, although 9d6 is clearly powerful.  No, we're looking at things in a real-world sense.  How hot can lightning get?  And how often is it deadly?

As for heat, lightning is the movement of an electrical charge which, strictly speaking, generates no sensible temperature.  However, environmental resistance to this movement does generate heat; and because air is a poor conductor of electricity, the heat thereby produced is just incredible.  How about 53,540 degrees Fahrenheit or five times hotter than the surface of the sun, although this is, admittedly, its coolest layer.  Pure power...

But how often is it fatal?  Luckily, only in about 10% of cases, which means your typical gaming displays are probably deadlier.  Sadly; however, many survivors suffer painful third-degree burns, and that's not all.  Metal jewelry can swiftly melt, leaving a painful tattoo, while a victim's blood vessels explode in so-called lightning trees or Lichtenberg figures, a temporary scarring outlining the internal damage.  Indeed, lightning can stop the heart instantly, making cardiac arrest a leading cause of lightning-related deaths.   

Short of death, however, lightning can cause permanent blindness, deafness, and brain damage, which is horrifically tragic.  Gaming oversimplifies this, but let's forget about the fantastic for a few minutes and talk about real world safety.  I became a meteorologist because my younger self was enamored with the weather, but also because I cared about protecting others from its (frequently) more turbulent moods.  Lightning is dangerous, especially as we enter severe weather season - but the following is for everyone...    

When thunder roars, go indoors (this one's top of the list, folks). 

If outdoors and unable to find shelter, crouch low, with as little of your body touching the ground as possible (strong electrical currents can run along the surface).

Stay away from concrete walls, floors, or shelters.  Avoid electrical equipment of all kinds and corded phones (cordless or cell phones are safe to use, however).

Go HERE for more advice and stay safe!  No matter where you live, lightning is deadly - in gaming and in real life - and we want you healthy and enjoying the hobby.

The above trivia can enhance a game.  For instance, GM's who seek realism and allow critical injury can incorporate lightning's effects well short of death; but even those who play straight might better describe either end of a failed saving throw.  And who knows, generous referees (in the spirit of charity) can grant bonuses to those characters who take the right precautions against these displays.  Do what you want, but in this real life we hope you'll play it safe and protect yourselves (and others) from the angry heavens...