Into the OSR & Historical Settings

Running my first OSR campaign and the friction between fantasy and reality.

Charles Landseer, The Eve of the Battle of Edge Hill, 1642, 1845.

The OSR Fantasy

I'm an inveterate tinkerer and renown contrarian, so after years of 5e and the Alien RPG—games with an explicit pop focus—I was excited to dive into the OSR and get DIY as hell. B/X D&D immediately caught my attention with its touted lethality, logistics metagame, and emergent narratives. I wanted the full OSR experience: gold as xp, parties full of retainers, hexes, tables, and combat as war.

I'm also big into horror and history, so Lamentations of the Flame Princess was a revelation. I opted to run Old School Essentials instead, out of admiration for its elegant design, but LotFP's published adventures became the basis for my current campaign set in 17th Century England.

Finding the Footing

I never intended to run to a historical setting, but one of my players was enthusiastic about persecuting Catholics and I love to bemoan iconoclasts, so I ran with it. After our introductory adventure, I slapped a hex grid on a map of England and installed a calendar for FoundryVTT because, as we all know, you can not have a meaningful campaign if strict time records are not kept!

My players, God bless them, entertained me when I told them we would be taking careful stock of our expenditures and passage of time across this sandbox world. One player volunteered to be Keeper of the Quest Log, and another bravely volunteered to become Keeper of the Spreadsheet. We began our third session exactly where my one-shot had intended to end: in the woods with a cart full of silver. 

What do you do now?

There was pretty much no roleplaying or gaming in that session at all. It became a shopping spree and logistics crunch, but that's what I signed up for. We enjoyed it, and laughed about the novelty afterwards, but I would try to avoid ever running a session like that again. The party left town attended by a retinue and armed with a handful of rumors, all of which led to the published adventures I was seeding into the campaign.

Exploring England

All that remained was to fix our campaign in time. I decided on May 1st, 1640, just before the English Civil Wars. I thought it would be cool to build up to the war and have an entire campaign's worth of characters suddenly break into teams like a realm divide in Total War: Shogun 2. But I made two critical mistakes here. The first, is how long it will take to ever get to that point, and second, England is basically the safest place you can be in 1640.

The Thirty Years War continued to devastate the mainland, but England had somehow avoided the bloodshed. There were skirmishes with the Scots in the north, known as the Bishop's Wars, but it wasn't until 1642 that things really kicked off. Setting the campaign in 1640 meant no enemy raids, no roving bands of deserters, no bold mercenary ventures, no great intrigue to get caught in the middle of, and also what the hell? They killed the last natural predators here hundreds of years ago! There's nothing to fight! England also lacks dramatic terrain or weather, and it's so densely populated you couldn't ever get too lost. I've got a large encounter table…but they're mostly social or trivial to a party as well equipped as mine. I wasn't sure how I was going to keep the journey engaging. Fortunately, history is a bottomless well of inspiration.

They're stopping to resupply at King's Lynn next week? Never heard of it. Let me just scan through Wikipedia and oh—

"A heart carved on the wall of the Tuesday Market Place supposedly marks the burning of an alleged witch, Margaret Read, in 1590. It is said that as she was burning her heart burst from her body and struck the wall."

Sick—The tavern will project memories of torment on magic-users and reaffirm the greatness of God to holy men. Then they press on towards Ely…

"During the Marian Persecutions, two men from Wisbech, constable William Wolsey and painter Robert Pygot, were accused of "not believing that the body and blood of Christ were present in the bread and wine of the sacrament of mass". For this Christian heresy, they were burnt at the stake in the Palace Green in front of Ely Cathedral."

Haunted cathedral; these quests write themselves. Turns out the Bishop of Ely at the time had just transferred from Norwich, so he can also pass on rumors of the city's corruption to the players and set the stage for Kelvin Green's adventure Forgive Us.

(As an aside, I like to rattle off a little history about each new settlement my players visit. You never know what it might inspire.)

Running the Sandbox

Fun to Prep

The sandbox approach is, as advertised, delightful to run and prep for. After each session, I review the recap and identify all of the consequences to come, and other new story hooks to follow up on later. B-plots take shape and recurring characters start popping up. The world grows larger when it reacts to their presence and spotlights their interests. Half our sessions have focused on the emergent journey at the expense of the destination, and they've all been great.

Combat As War

Despite—or because of—the martial prowess of my very wealthy party, there has been little combat. Most violent encounters have foregone rolling entirely, because the outcome is obvious. Their war dogs can hunt down any stinkin' thief that tries to flee, and their sheer number of retainers will swiss cheese pretty much anyone or anything. At one point they dug murder holes into a basement to fire on the beast inside without exposing themselves to its rampage. Combat as war. It's working. The fact that they can't be contested will hopefully make them grow bolder and bolder until they bite off more they can chew. Or, maybe they'll get bored of the game. To be determined.

Rules and Procedures

Despite being far more lightweight than recent editions, B/X D&D still feels encumbered by fiddly rules and lengthy procedures; it's too much for me to manage at the table. I get what they're going for—and can, in fact—achieve, but I often forget to roll them entirely or fudge when I do remember. I've learned that I prefer to read the room and let my own creative intuition lead the way. 

Minutia

It's annoying to ask the party if they've accounted for all the rations they'll need, bearing in mind their dogs need to eat too. It's not exciting to mass roll encounter dice for each hex between Point A and B, and the time it takes to measure hexes is a slog. Tracking food and money is tolerable to a slight degree, but only to a single player, whose occasional absence is sorely felt. Retainer pay was simplified to 1sp per level* to make payroll (ugh) simpler, but now the scale of our party is getting hard to keep track of.

* We're using the silver standard.

Reflections

Despite my few misgivings, I've had more fun running an OSR sandbox and historical setting than with anything else I've played. I am not sure B/X is the system for us in the long term though. With more GM experience to come, I expect to gain a better understanding of which components work for us, and which don't.

Keeping strict time records makes my brain feel good and the burden falls solely on me, so no issue there. I'm also pleased with the frequency and duration of combat so far—which is to say, fuck combat, although I'm brainstorming some ways to Make England Dangerous Again.

Travel and inventory definitely need to be streamlined to remain viable long term. I might reduce the hexcrawl to a pointcrawl—England seems particularly well suited to this—and calculate flat travel times and costs. Retainers and party assets (horses, wagons, etc.) need simplifying somehow, but I've got no ideas as of yet. That sort of change might require a new system entirely. 

Over the next few months I will be surveying alternatives to B/X D&D, but the march towards Civil War proceeds.

Anthony van Dyck, Charles I in Three Positions, 1635–1636.