OSRdF Revisited

In January 2019, I signed on to Tam H's OMGAM project to create one micro-game per month.  Over the course of that year, I produced 12 tiny games for the project as well as a few others for various game jams and challenges.

The very first one was called OSRdF, or "Old School Roll-under, dF".  I also wrote the first real content for this blog in that same month of January where I talked about the intentions and thoughts behind that game.

Very briefly, and without any of the philosophy, it is like this:  

• You have six stats because that's what White Box had, though the names have changed
• You roll under them to do things because that is what you did back then
• You roll randomly for your stats for the same reason, and because of a bunch of other baggage
• There is no dedicated combat system because we already have the roll-under thing and don't need anything else
• It uses Fudge dice for two reasons:  First, I like them because they only have + and - and I always thought the very notion of them really gave the middle finger to the notion that complex dice systems were important.  Second, a few people had recently (at the time OSRdF was released) been really hostile to the opinion that Fate Accelerated is in spirit an OSR game, and I was feeling a bit sassy about it.

I have made noises a few times about expanding this game and making modules for it, and that starts now. There is still a lot about this game that I implied without stating, and one really has to look sideways at it to spot any traditional fantasy gaming in there -- so here is a teaser:

	Brawn	Grace	Creativity	Logic	Will	Empathy
Brawn	bend bars, save v poison	bows	melee	scale rough surfaces	lift gates	intimidation
Grace		impersonate Elf, move silent	dodge bonus	pick locks	scale sheer surfaces	pick pockets
Creativity			Cleric spells	spot traps	save v wand	persuasion
Logic				Wizard spells	save v charm	read languages
Will					save v death	henchman limit
Empathy						Druidic spells

Now, there are some place-holders in here, and a couple of tongue-in-cheek jokes that wont make the final cut.  But this is the basic form of how a skin of OSRdF emulates the kind of fantasy RPGs that I played in the 80s.

I have four of these drafted that evolve the basic system through forty years, taking on slightly different styles and varying the rules at each decade.

A produced version of it was going to be coming for Zine Quest for 2022, but between the pandemic and other events that didn't quite happen.  I might still lay it out for print, commission an artist, pay an editor, and put a game (or possibly a collection of multiple games) into peoples' hands to play.  But that is probably a couple years off when I take a realistic look at my other commitments.