Excellent Tabletop RPGs From The Old School Revival Genre

Excellent Tabletop RPGs From The Old School Revival Genre

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A look at “Old School Revival” RPGs that try to recreate the tense, exploration-based tabletop gaming of early 1970s D&D.

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Excellent Tabletop RPGs From The Old School Revival Genre

The tabletop roleplaying game scene has gone through many changes over the years, but one of the newest trends in the community, a design philosophy known as the “Old School Revival,” hearkens back to 1970s Dungeons & Dragons and other early roleplaying games that emphasized exploration, dungeon-crawling, and vulnerable, fragile player characters. In games like Old-School Essentials and Into The Odd, expect to see randomly rolled ability scores, tables of random encounters and treasure, hired henchmen, and ragtag adventurers overcoming obstacles with lateral thinking.

There’s a certain “back in my day” attitude veterans of first edition D&D and other early roleplaying games of the ’70s and ’80s like to express around younger members of the tabletop community. “Back in my day,” they might say, “we had to roll up our character’s ability scores with three six-sided dice, and if you rolled poor, you were stuck with it. Back in my day, we poked every square of the dungeon with a ten foot pole to check for deadly traps. Back in my day, we had a binder full of backup character sheets just in case our current adventurer bit the dust.”

The Old School Revival movement of game design pays loving homage the Basic and Expert rules for Dungeons & Dragons, simplified guidelines included in the Red and Blue D&D starter boxes that introduced ’70s and ’80s gamers to the idea of roleplaying games. More than strict rule emulation, though, OSR RPGs like those mentioned below seek to capture the feel of roleplaying game sessions from the time via the following principles: high lethality, randomized and horribly unbalanced encounters, followers who flock to the side of high-level adventurers, and a free-form, unplanned plot that rewards careful exploration and creative solutions to dangerous scenarios.

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Best Old-School Revival RPGs: Old-School Essentials

Excellent Tabletop RPGs From The Old School Revival Genre

The Old-School Essentials series of gamebooks are built on rules functionally identical to the “Basic/Expert” rulesets included in the Red and Blue Boxes for early commercial D&D. Adventurers (with base character classes such as Fighter, Cleric, Magic-User, Thief, Elf, Dwarf, and Halfing) delve deep into haunted wilds and forsaken dungeons, risking gruesome death for a chance at fortune and glory. There are many unique parts of Old-School Essentials which games of more modern design lack: rules for followers who can assist adventuring PCs and carry their heavy stuff during expeditions, high-level characters gaining personal strongholds, gameplay rules for negotiating with or de-escalating conflicts with wandering monsters, and more.

Best Old-School Revival RPGs: The Black Hack

Excellent Tabletop RPGs From The Old School Revival Genre

The Black Hack, true to its title, takes the dungeon-crawling gameplay of classic D&D fantasy and strips it down to the bare essentials, keeping the free-form exploration gameplay core to OSR and updating it with modern mechanics. The gameplay rules of The Black Hack – basic dice rolls, character classes, attributes, equipment, combat, exploration, leveling up, etc. – take up around 30 pages, while the remainder of the book contains random story generation tables and other useful resources for aspiring GMs. Poetically enough, the straightforward simplicity of The Black Hack has inspired several other spin-off games with the same base mechanics, such as the space opera-themed The Space Hack or the giant robot-centered The Mecha Hack.

Best Old-School Revival RPGs: Into The Odd

Excellent Tabletop RPGs From The Old School Revival Genre

Into The Odd, a compact OSR RPG written by Chris McDowall, takes a similar approach to The Black Hack, streamlining many of the classic mechanics from vintage 1980s B/X D&D into 48 pages of content. Character attributes are simplified down to the three abilities of Strength, Dexterity, and Willpower, while attacks are just a matter of rolling a weapon’s damage dice and subtracting the enemy’s armor. Where Into the Odd diverges from The Black Hack’s generic sword-and-sorcery trappings is in how it includes an original campaign setting – a world of industrial societies, flintlock rifles, and mercenary adventurers in search of Arcana, magical devices with power beyond the limits of technology. Electric Bastionland, an art deco modern fantasy RPG also written by Chris McDowall, updates the mechanics of Into The Odd and adds in an elaborate generator describing the number and types of failed careers PCs pursued before turning to the risky business of Treasure Hunting.

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Best Old-School Revival RPGs: Troika

The second edition of Troika, an elegant and charming science-fantasy RPG book that clocks in around 120 pages, borrows a lot of cues from the Old School Revival movement, particularly in how character creation is completely randomized through the rolling of dice – not just to determine attributes like Skill, Stamina, or Luck, but to select elements of the character’s life story by consulting charts with bizarre backgrounds such as “Thinking Engine” or “Monkeymonger”. Despite not having an official campaign setting, every page of Troika is bursting at the seems with flavor, thanks to a humorous writing style which calls to mind the deadpan humor of British fantasy writers such as Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett. In the true spirit of Old School Revival, every game of Troika will keep players on their toes.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/best-old-school-tabletop-rpgs-osr-genre-dnd

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