How I got into the OSR

Let's get this out of the way - This is going to be a deeply self-indulgent post. I am writing this thing mostly since I've had to explain it in a few places just to help clear the perspective I am coming from during a discussion regarding older D&D/OSR/Whatever we're calling this right now, so hey, why not just write it up here and then I can link people to it.

Right then. On with the show! 

Some Background

I am Bulgarian, and I was born in Bulgaria. As such I had zero exposure to older editions of D&D (I mean anything from before 3E really) as a child. My first real proper exposure to Dungeons and Dragons was actually through video games - Baldur's Gate 2 along with Icewind Dale 1 and 2. I also spent so much of my youth playing Fallout 1 and 2, Arcanum, Diablo, and other classics of the CRPG and Action RPG genres. 

Ok, so then what? Well, after a while, in my early teens, I found out through some of the video game magazines that I read (and I read ALL of them for a span of about 5-6 years. Every single issue of every single one that was published every month.) about tabletop RPGs, and was intrigued.

Except even then...I was in Bulgaria, remember? There was no D&D. Or any other RPG you could find. Instead I managed to find some pirated scans online here and there, and also got in touch with the, then still existing, broader RPG community in Bulgaria through the now dead rpg.bg forums (rest in piece, you beautiful mess!). I did buy a copy of Endival, the first ever Bulgarian RPG, and I read through it though I could not really grasp much of the rules at the time (mostly, on reflection, because they are not good or well written.)

Soon enough I did find a group to play with in my home town, and so my first ever TTRPG experience was playing in a homebrewed system and setting. In fact it took me years to even play D&D for the first time, and that was 3rd Edition. I bounced off it hard - there were too many rules, too many lists upon lists of stuff and it was all different from the AD&D 2e I had been exposed to through video games. 

I spent the next 17+ years playing all kinds of RPGs instead. I even found work in the industry, working as an illustrator and later art director on various Glorantha-related projects. 

Some more Background

While I had become a steady enjoyer of tabletop RPGs, I also didn't get to play them as often as I'd like. I have also spent several years playing in completely freeform roleplay over MSN Messenger, and later on a slightly more structured (slightly) forum game set in the same setting. I also kept playing more video games.

Over the years I got interested in the roguelike genre. I played NetHack, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, bit of Angband (but not that much to really get into that branch of the genre), some DoomRL, some Brogue (but not enough sadly), and others. And that got me thinking...why is it that nobody is playing this kind of stuff on the tabletop? I mean I knew a lot of this whole "crawling through a big fuck off dungeon and dealing with resources" style of gaming existed, but the general consensus among the aforementioned Bulgarian RPG community was that this style of play was wrong, not fun and not something anyone did nowadays, so why even bother with it? But I just...knew. I knew there had to be some way to make it fun, because fuck it - it was fun as a video game right? Surely someone out there had figured out how to make this work better at the tabletop! (Foreshadowing!)

Ok, now for the whole OSR bit

I had heard vague murmurings about the OSR over the years. Even if I continued to have zero interest in D&D, and definitely wasn't part of the OSR scene yet, I was still heavily involved in tabletop RPGs so I of course heard of it. Lamentations of the Flame Princess was a hot thing going on, I know people were doing stuff relating to old D&D. 

The first thing that actually got me interested in all this mess was Dungeon Crawl Classics. My LGS had gotten some of their Free RPG Day books, so I decided to grab one just to check it out. I was confused, but charmed and intrigued. A lot of the stuff in that was a bit eyebrow raising, kind of gimmicky (and let's be honest here, as much as I love DCC...it's mostly a gimmick. But a gimmick can carry a lot too). 

But I was hooked! In 2018 I went to my first GenCon and one of the things I got was the full DCC rules, along with some adventures I was recommended. That got me properly excited, and from there on I started to pay more attention to the OSR sphere. That, you might also realize, is also about the time the whole Zak shitstorm finally hit the proverbial fan. It did not deter me though, as I had mercifully had very little direct exposure to the specimen himself (I had spent my G+ days at the Glorantha community, so close yet so far away from the big hot period for the OSR on that platform), so for me it just made me go "Yeah, that checks out."

Once I actually started to read up on what the OSR was aiming for and what people were doing with it - then I really got hooked! All that roguelike stuff I had thought would be cool to do? People were doing it. Fuck, people had been doing it since the very beginning of the tabletop RPG hobby! I felt almost vindicated, to be honest. I mean here I was...not even reinventing the wheel, but pondering how wheels might be a nice thing to have! 

As OSE had already dropped at that point, and a friend of mine who is also a fan of DCC has the Classic tome, I decided to check it out. I was interested in getting a B/X clone to have, and while I was not going to go for LotFP, I wasn't sure which one to pick. I mean if there is one thing the OSR loves, it's its B/X retroclones! 

I ended up settling on OSE just because I really enjoy how useable at the table the books are, and in fact ran and then played in a game with my partners and a few friends, and then started a weekly OSE open table campaign which ran for 4 months and gave me a lot of good insights into how to GM for this style and what I liked and didn't like about it! (You can read more about it if you check out the Greylands tag on this blog!)

While all of this was happening, I spent the last 4 years devouring as much stuff as I could - zines, blogposts, books...anything that explained the principles and practice behind the OSR, the theories and also the history. I tend to dive like that into hobbies - for me it is never enough to simply "do the thing". I want to know how, when and why others also do the thing! 

And so...here I am. Posting on my OSR-focused blog, spending most of my online time thinking about OSR shit, planning and prepping for an OD&D based campaign (more of that hopefully soon on here!), and OSR books and zines having firmly overtaken my gaming bookshelves in terms of quantity and sheer volume!

Why did you tell me all of this?

As stated above, I find it fascinating why people actually do the things they do. This extends to playing tabletop RPGs too. I find the reason behind why someone is into the OSR to be just as fascinating as the OSR itself. Is it nostalgia? For some - yes. Is it a rejection of the RPG mainstream? Definitely from what I've observed. Is it simply thinking at this is just a nice way to play? Absolutely! 

I also find that my perspective, being an absolute outsider and thus having no inherit predisposition towards it, kind of gives me a different (if not any more or less special) view on the OSR and old D&D.

 And if you take anything out of this post, then take this - Write one of these about yourself! Tell me and everyone else why is it that you play the games you play and how you play them! Outline your perspective and background, and this way maybe, hopefully, people will have a better understanding of you and of where you're coming from!