Chronicles of the Consortium

Reading around the various blogs I can find, it turns out that there are some seriously fun creative people doing all sorts of good things out there. They seem mostly to have started with what might be called the OSR, but actually a much better group name has been suggested by the artists and writer  Zak Smith among others - DIY RPG. Mostly, these are independent designers who start with D&D and then work their way outwards from there, and Zak is one of the most inventive of the bunch. He and his gaming group took a massive amount of internet flak over several years, for no reason that I can understand, and that seems petty and vindictive to me. The post I am making now isn't only a way to support what he has been doing, but also to bring his work to the attention of anyone who might be reading this blog of mine. My main intention has been to use this as a way of cataloguing my play sessions for myself, and anyone else who likes reading it can see what we are doing. However,...

I have a confession to make: I missed the Old School Renaissance or Revival or whatever entirely. This is because I stopped roleplaying for more than twenty years, concentrating instead on ancients figure wargaming, with some Napoleonics thrown in for good measure. It just slotted better into that period of my life. However, now that I have started RPGs again courtesy of my kids, I am taking advantage of the fact that in the meantime this internet thing has happened. The other thing that has happened is the OSR, which mostly seems to be a kind of play (and associated aesthetic, perhaps?) that tries to return to the roots of roleplaying - mad, bad and dangerous to know. And deadly. Very deadly. I don't play D&D in any of its manifestations, having lost interest around 1980, but I did get right into Chaosium's BRP-related systems when they first came out. I went through an intensive period from around 1983-1990 playing Stormbringer , Hawkmoon  and Call of Cthulhu. Not Runeq...