Basic Fantasy RPG (BFRPG): Embracing the OSR Philosophy of “Rulings, Not Rules”

Full Transcript Outline (Quick Jumps)

00:00 Introduction to OCon and Basic Fantasy RPG

02:13 The Birth of Basic Fantasy RPG and the OSR Movement

05:36 Understanding Old School Gaming Mechanics

12:25 Comparing Basic Fantasy RPG to Dungeons and Dragons

18:51 The Role of Community in Basic Fantasy RPG

25:03 The Impact of the OGL Debacle on the Community

25:42 The Origins of Basic Fantasy RPG

27:06 Open Source and Community Contributions

28:38 Adventure Design Philosophy

30:45 Favorite Adventures and Game Mastering

35:14 Compatibility Across Editions

40:43 Advice for New Players at Conventions

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Hereward (00:23.246)
Welcome to the first OH!Conversations video. I’m Hereward Proops I’m one of the directors of OH!CON And in the run up to this year’s convention, which will be held at University of Highlands and Islands, Stornoway campus on Saturday, 14th of October, 2023. On the run up to it, we’re going to be sharing some videos looking at all things nerdy.

And for today’s video, I’m joined by a really special guest all the way from Missouri, USA. It’s Mr. Chris Gonneman. Chris is the creator of Basic Fantasy Role Playing Game, an open source game system that’s modeled on the early fantasy role playing games of the 1980s. Chris, thanks so much for making the time for us to have this chat.

I’m glad to do it. Glad to do it.

Wonderful. I’m going to start with a disclosure. I’m a huge fan of this system. Basic Fantasy is one of two open source role playing games that we’re going to be demoing and pushing hard at the con for those that sign up to them. And I’m thrilled to say that I’m going to be the person GMing the Basic Fantasy sessions. I’ve been using it with my own group for over three years now, and I absolutely love it. I find it easy enough for

players to get to grips with fairly quickly. It’s streamlined enough to ensure that play doesn’t become bogged down in checking rules all the time. But it’s also deep enough to sustain a lengthy campaign with plenty of space for character growth and progression. I grew up playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, second edition, and basic fantasy for me really scratches that old school itch. So that brings me to my first point, my first…

Hereward (02:13.398)
My first question for Chris, can you tell us a bit about the old school Renaissance within the tabletop role playing game community and how basic fantasy came about?

Well, the funny part about that is, is basic fantasy RPG is older than the OSR. When, when I, in 2006, when I released the first versions online on the Dragon’s Foot forums, that was in, well, early in year, February, March, I forget exactly. There was no OSR. There was no old school Renaissance. There was one game in print at the time, Castles and Crusades that

made a solid aim at being an OGL based game that was old school, but they used some more modern mechanics in the game. It was more of a light game than it was an old school game. There are old school assumptions built into it though. So I can’t argue the point that it’s an old school game, that it really wasn’t exploring anything. I set out to create basic fantasy because of nostalgia.

I mean, I wanted to run the old game for my players, but my books were falling apart. And at that time, 2006, you couldn’t buy them. Nobody was doing reprints. There was no options that you couldn’t even buy PDFs at the time for the games that I wanted to run. And there were aspects of those games that I would have changed anyway. So I set out to create a game for my players. Curiously, about the same time was when Stuart Marshall and Matt Finch began working on their games.

Osric and Swords and Wizardry. I’ve got that backwards, think, author versus game. But anyway, we all started about the same time. For a little while, the three of us and Dan Proctor with his Labyrinth Lord, we were it. We were the OSR and nobody had even coined the term yet. There was arguments over what to even call these games. The term retro clone didn’t immediately catch, actually, but that’s

Chris G (04:15.97)
That’s what we refer to them as anyway. It was for me, I wrote it for me. But I have always been a big believer in sharing. I have always been a big believer in community and a group of people who are like-minded coming together and building something that they can all appreciate and use. Through the Dragonsfoot forums, I had access to a lot of people.

Spread all over the planet who were game fans who were old school game fans and who were interested in the project when it first appeared. Unlike the other guys I listed all of them were fine gentlemen and I’ve worked with all but Dan Proctor. I’ve actually worked with him, but they didn’t create open source games in the same fashion that we did. I created created not just a game I set out to build a community. And I was fortunate that the community did come together behind it. The hardest part about that is letting.

people in and letting people touch the stuff that I’ve created and change it and work with it. But I’ve got good people I’m working with. I’ve got a fantastic team that we built over the years. People have come and gone, but I’ve always had a good team to work with. But you asked me about old school renaissance. To understand the old school renaissance, you need to understand the old school. In the original games, in the old school games, the

Game system was simple, not for the sake of simplicity. was simple because the players of those games who, of them, most of them in the very earliest games, started out playing war games were accustomed to having a referee whose job it was to interpret the rules. The job of the referee was to decide what the game rules actually were, to decide for a particular table how certain rules were to be interpreted. They were working with war game rules, but the same thing applies to the role-playing rules. The games were designed to work

differently. They were designed to challenge not just the player characters, but the players. So a lot of things that are considered standard in modern games, the first thing comes to mind is sense motive. You don’t find those in old school games. In old school games, it’s up to the player to decide if he or she believes the actual stated motives of an NPC or not. They have to make it up their own mind. And there are game

Chris G (06:34.008)
tools and game mechanics to make that easier or harder depending on the player character. But ultimately it’s up to the player to make those decisions. The games are lethal, especially at low level characters die. Modern games you set out to create a character and you build the character and the character has a lot of moving parts and the character when he or she or they walk into the game. Is already a hero already has powers already has many special abilities to choose from in an old school game.

you don’t have that stuff. You don’t start with a backstory. You start out as raw, fresh off the farm, fresh out of your apprenticeship with a wizard, fresh out of your training with the church, fresh out of your training with the thieves guild or whatever your character happens to be. You are green as grass and starting out instead of coming into the game saying this is how I became this way in an old school cane. You start out as almost nothing and you become in the game.

And the best thing about that is you can create the best backstory in the world. Nobody wants to hear it. Nobody wants to hear your backstory. Nobody wants to hear the convoluted scenarios that you invented to describe how your character came to have all these powers. But if you play the game in the old school fashion and you have a character who manages to survive past first level, things will happen. Things will happen in the game to your character. And the other players are participants in that.

Many of them, not all of them, depending on how well your group holds together will have been there when you fought the witch or ate the dragon’s heart or whatever that led to you acquiring magic items or learning new powers or acquiring new abilities or whatever. They will have been there for that. You know, they will have seen it. And instead of them zoning out, when you start trying to tell a story, they’ll join in and, know, remind you of the stupid decisions you made or.

You know how everybody was sweating bullets when you had to roll that saving throw. I went through that myself once in a game where my character was. Enticed into eating the heart of a dragon before anybody told him how hard the saving throw was. And this was a house rule of the game master and my character survived it and came out with some extra power and that was pretty darn cool, but. I was sweating bullets rolling that die roll and so were the and so were some of the players around the table. It was just it was. It was exciting. It was interesting.

Chris G (08:54.892)
People don’t have to be told your backstory if they were there for it. And you’ll remember the things that happened to the other players and the good or bad decisions that they made, the good or bad roles that they made. It’s engaging in that sense to me anyway. That’s old school. Old school is about rulings. People say that all the time. Ruling is not rules, but it really is. The game master reads, I mean, this is it. This is the book right here. This is whole book.

It is that thick. That is not even quite as thick as a modern player’s handbook. And this is the whole game. It’s the game master’s rules. That’s the majority of the monsters you’re going to encounter are all in there along with the player character rules. That’s the whole game. There’s a lot of unfilled space in a game written that way. And it’s intended for the game master to make those decisions, to build the world on the fly as he or she sees fit.

The of this is old school games are harder to game master. They’re easier in some ways because you don’t have to spend as much time building monsters. Our monsters are simple. Mechanics are simple. Creating monsters is simple. But learning the actual skills of interacting with the players, dealing with the crazy ideas that they’re going to come up with in a thoughtful, respectful, but appropriate fashion.

And you know, not just saying no, you can’t do that. You should never do that. You should never say you can’t do that. And an old school game you should say you can try.

That’s exactly what I was going to say. That’s the thing I find myself saying all the time. Hey, you can try. Let’s go for it.

Chris G (10:34.026)
It’s OK to tell the players that your character doesn’t think that’s a good idea, but you can’t tell them not to do it. You know, because in the real world we do that stuff. I got on a roller coaster once. It was a real big mistake and I regretted it for years afterwards, but that was my decision and I think I knew it was a dumb decision at the time and that’s probably about the worst thing that that I’ve worst decision I’ve made in terms of getting myself hurt. But you know, it’s it’s one of those things you. This is how the old school games work.

They are much more dependent on a good game master, which of course could be a problem if you’re trying to break a new game master in. They’re also more dependent on players understanding that the game is in front of you. It’s not behind you. There’s no backstory here. I have a character that I’ve played a few times in other people’s games and this is his backstory. I am Mosiah, son of Josa, son of Jorah of the Hill people. And this is my grandfather’s axe.

That’s my backstory. That’s it. Nobody had time for their eyes to roll back in their head or to go to sleep on my backstory. That is his backstory and that’s all you need to know about it. And this is where we are. This is how the old school games work.

It’s absolutely true. And one of the things I find, you know, when players come to the table with a great backstory, I love it because it’s something that I as a GM can kind of perhaps incorporate into the campaign at a later date. But at the same time, you know, if someone comes to the comes to the table and they’ve got this extensive backstory talking about how, you know, this person, their character slayed a whole tribe of goblins single handed. It’s like, well, why aren’t you like level eight now already? Why are you starting at level one? You know.

Level ones are feeble characters and that’s part of the fun, isn’t it? To start off weak and, you know…

Chris G (12:25.0)
And that’s part of the challenge of an old school game is keeping a character alive at a level being smart enough not to get that character killed. And then once you get to higher level, you know, you have accomplishments to look back on. Character walks into a game and into a modern game and they have a half dozen special abilities that they can use spells or tricks or feats or whatever you call them in your particular rule system. But they already have a lot going on in their lives.

And there’s very little to connect them to the other party members. If you all started out green as grass and you all grow up together in the game, then you’re more connected.

That’s a wonderful point, yeah. And the idea that actually if we’re talking about building connections between our players and things, it’s that way that the characters experience the adventures together. They’ve not had adventures before they come to the table.

Little or no, little no dentures.

That brings me to my next point. mean, the vast majority of people coming to fantasy tabletop role-playing games will do so via Dungeons and Dragons. And for many people, that’s all they know of this genre of gaming. That’s it, you know. So my question, and this is an important one because I’ve had a lot of people saying, coming to me and saying, at the con, are we going to be doing D &D? And I say,

Hereward (13:55.906)
What do you feel basic fantasy does better than Dungeons and Dragons? We’ll talk fifth edition. We’ll talk, you know, what does basic fantasy offer that fifth edition doesn’t offer?

to understand that the last modern D &D game that I actually understood to any degree was 3.5 because I don’t, I’m a forever GM. So I’m not, I’m not running those games. I’m not playing those games. I’ve never had any reason to learn how they work. So I can’t really tell you a lot about how basic fantasy is different.

I would say better, that’s personal taste. And I’m not gonna crap on anybody else’s preferences. If you prefer fifth edition, that’s fine, do your thing. I’m not gonna tell you it’s wrong. There are people, grognards who would say that you are wrong, but no, if it makes you happy, if it’s your game, do your thing, that’s fine. But if you wanna play a game that is intended to be a challenge for you, basic fantasy is a challenge. Basic fantasy is meant to be a challenge.

If you look at your character sheet and you think you can only do what’s on your character sheet, you need to change your mind. Fifth edition works that way to some extent. I don’t know the details. know the older older new additions that post 2000 editions all pretty much did. You can do what your character sheet says and there’s a rule for everything. And if you can’t find a rule for something you haven’t bought the right book. And that’s that’s how those games are meant to work. They’re deeply intricately interconnected. They’re complicated. There’s a lot of details and you can spend a lot of time looking up rules.

But at the same time, know, if that’s your thing, that’s your thing. If you’re gonna play, you’re gonna play an old school game, it’s a challenge. It’s a challenge for you as a player, challenge for you as a game master to interact, to make decisions, look at your character sheet. And if there’s not something obviously on it, then put yourself in your character’s position. You are a fighter, you are a thief, a cleric.

Chris G (15:57.878)
Magic user, you’re standing in a dungeon and there are goblins ahead of you and you don’t immediately have a thought about a good thing to do. What would you do if your answer is run away? That’s a good answer. Running away is often a good answer. This is another thing that I’ve discovered. Modern games, modern D and D games tend to have an assumption that whatever you face, you can defeat. Old school games don’t work that way. You might meet something you can’t fight.

You need to understand that running away is perfectly acceptable. Parlaying with the monster, paying off a dragon so it doesn’t eat you is perfectly acceptable. Yeah, the dragon could probably eat you and then take your money. you know, fighting you might be dangerous for the dragon. Maybe if the dragon just talks you out of some of your money or most of your money. There was a dragon on the road to twin land in my campaign, a green dragon who never fought the player characters, but every time they came by, he would take half their gold.

he could smell gold so they couldn’t cheat him. He always knew how much gold they had and he’d say that’s not half of it, more. Put it down there right in front of me. And that was thing that they had to deal with. They knew if they met the dragon, he was going to clean him out. And they had to think of solutions for that problem. If they wanted or needed that extra gold, they needed to find a way to avoid the dragon because they knew they couldn’t beat him. were second, third level at the time. That’s just an example of the kind of things that you can have in the game.

But that’s the difference. You have to get, I guess the best advice I can give somebody coming out of a modern edition of D &D is don’t think that what’s on your probably very meager looking character sheet is all your character can do. Think about it as a human being or whatever you’re playing in that role. Think about it as a person in that role, in that position. What could you do?

come up with something from there. And I have heard of some pretty crazy ideas and I’ve seen them pulled off and I’ve seen them entertainingly not succeed.

Hereward (18:01.934)
It’s one of the things I love about the system is actually that there’s no skills like there is or proficiencies, you know, and the way I’ve done it with my players for the last three years is if it fits with your backstory, you’ve got a pretty good chance of being able to do it. So that’s encouraged them to kind of flesh out a backstory that’s, know, the dwarf can craft armor and stuff like that because he was a…

He was working in a dwarven forge before he moved there. So these sorts of things, think, been, it helps the players be a bit more creative, but also get involved with their character a little bit more than just looking at, what stat have I got on a sheet in front of me?

You made a comment about basic fantasy having enough in it to sustain a long running campaign. are at, we are at, in my campaign, my home game campaign. we are at the first of two expected, not planned, but expected climaxes in a 20 year campaign. Wow. We are, we are to that point. And the last session, the main fighting character didn’t even fight anything. The whole.

The whole story for the whole session was how do we sneak into the capital city without being caught by the usurper King’s people and the solutions that they found were entertaining. It was very, very interesting seeing how they pulled that off next game. We get to see how they deal with the usurper himself, so this is going to be going to be interesting. I’m probably pronouncing that badly, but anyway.

It’s always fascinating to see how players can subvert perhaps your expectations as a GM of what you think they might get up to and then they come out with a plan that you just think, wow, I didn’t see that one coming.

Chris G (19:57.844)
One of the things that I counsel people, and this is not strictly an old school thing. This is something you can find in any game. I do not believe in building railroads. not. I do not believe in building railroads. think building a railroad is always a mistake. I think the players should always have the freedom to approach their in game problems in whatever fashion they find. And you should not have a series of scenes that you.

so badly need to happen that you will force them to happen. You may think this is what’s likely to happen when they meet a certain character, encounter a certain monster or whatever, enter a particular dungeon, but you should never have a plan that requires it to happen that way. And this railroad building, this started long before the new school. There are many old school sources that are full of railroads and I don’t like railroads. Players should always have the flexibility to

to make whatever decisions works for them. And as a game master, if you write a game that has rails, I think you’ve done it wrong. You have to have rails in like a video game, for example, because the computer game simply can’t be prepared for the things that a human game master can be prepared for, at least not yet. The players have to be funneled through a series of cut scenes and so forth. That shouldn’t happen in a role in a tabletop role playing game because you have a human being as your game master. You should use that.

The game should use that the game should benefit from having the flexibility of a human being to actually deal with whatever nonsense the players come up with.

It’s spectacular nonsense, weren’t they? One of the things that really sustains games over time is the community around it. Can you tell us a bit about the basic fantasy community and how they contribute to the game?

Chris G (21:56.814)
It’s not just a question of how they contribute. It’s a question that the game wouldn’t exist in anything resembling its current form without a community. When I finished doing the fourth edition book and I looked at the credits page and my screen went off, that credits page is full. Look at all them credits. Half the page is just names.

Um, some of those people haven’t been with the project since 2007, 2008. had people who came in, we were the only game as it were in town. People who came in, participated, you shared stuff. had one guy who wrote basically the entire sections on oil and holy water in the combat section. I haven’t heard a word out of him in over a decade. Um, I know he moved on to another game and that’s fine, but while he was there, he contributed and we’ve got that. community.

Building a community is one of my goals. That’s the success I point at, not having written the game. Writing a game is cool, but I could have written a game without a community. But building a community around the game, that was my goal. And I think I’m pretty happy with my success. I was knocked over by it in January when the OGL debacle started, when Wizards decided to mess with the entire community of game designers who were depending on their open game license.

Not just us, we weren’t even on their radar. We weren’t their target, but we were nonetheless within the the blast zone that would have gone off if they had actually done what they set out to do. When they whole thing started and we realized we needed to separate ourselves from the OGL and to do that, we needed to get the SRD text out of the game. I posted a call to action for that and within literally hours.

A dedicated team had appeared out of nowhere, like magic, like you rubbed the lamp and they came out and smoke and they were doing it and they did it so fast. My regular editing team couldn’t even keep up with them. The regular production team, the production director, James Lemon, he just kind of backed off and let him know because they were plowing through stuff and I was.

Chris G (24:12.558)
As they identified it, I was fixing it. I was going through the game, rewriting whole sections where this SRD text existed, removing it and replacing it. And they, it’s all documented. We have a detailed list of everything they found and everything we changed. And if there is ever a question, if we did it right, we have a record. But that, it stunned me. The outpouring of assistance and artists popped up.

So that.

Chris G (24:40.834)
just almost as fast to fill in the new material that we needed. It was confusing at times. We took missteps. We went down blind alleys. It was not a neat, seamless, orderly, or necessarily well-planned process. But I had aims to have it out in June, and we got it out in June.

It was amazing from, as you said, January when the OGL thing started with Wizards of the Coast to see how quickly 4th Edition, I’ve got my copy here, to see how quickly 4th Edition got out and is now available to download for free from the website or to buy your print-on-demand copies.

Is there any other retro clone or OSR game that has got their new Creative Commons version out?

You don’t, I don’t know. I don’t know. I really don’t know. that’s, that’s one place where I do kind of fall down. I’m not really part of the larger OSR movement. I never really have been. I may be one, I believe I am one of the fat, one of the founders of the OSR.

But I haven’t paid attention to it. I haven’t paid attention to the larger community, the larger range of stuff out there. I do occasionally look at adventures for other games that I know are reasonably compatible because sometimes I need another adventure and I don’t have one of my own. And when I say my own, I should say our own because right now the majority of our material isn’t mine. Majority of our adventure material was submitted by other people. I’ve got a whole bookshelf over here full of game materials, adventures written by numerous people.

Chris G (26:35.982)
and I’ve got some, haven’t even run yet. so I shouldn’t run out anytime soon anyway. that’s, that’s the other thing is I say this all the time. but it’s sort of vaguely true. Basic fantasy RPG is a scam to get people to write adventures for me.

Chris G (26:57.728)
I mean, you know, there’s piles of adventure materials that just pop up and I cherry pick out of them, whatever I think I can fit into my game.

That actually brings me to my next question. Well done. mean, basic fantasy is an open source game. So for those that aren’t aware, that means that there’s a huge amount of game related content available to download for free from the Basic Fantasy website. And that’s rule books, supplemental rules, if you want to go into more.

complexity for your game so you can have weapon specialization, different character classes like paladins and rangers and there are campaign settings. So I’ve got Morgan’s here. Okay.

to stop you on that. We will not publish just a settings book. One of my hard and fast rules is we will not publish a book that is just a settings book. Morgan’s Fort is a series of adventures that happens to have a little setting attached to it. There is some settings related material in JN1, the chaotic caves, but it’s a book of adventures that just happens to have a little setting. I don’t want to publish Gazetteers. They were fun to read when I was younger.

But there’s too much material. If you write a book that is nothing but a description of your campaign world or even a detailed description of an area of your campaign world, there’s too much information there for anybody to really remember. And you end up getting it sideways. It’s better to have the material simpler, sketchier, less detailed, and leave it to the individual game master to fit it to his or her view of how the world should work.

Hereward (28:38.346)
You are absolutely right. mean, I’ve been running Morgan Sport for three years now and the map has been just the most wonderful thing because all this stuff, the characters, the heroes have traveled all over the place. They’ve been up here to the Demon Frost Mountains. They’ve been to the Venro, the island of the elves. They’ve been all over the place. And what’s been really joyous is actually through playing.

We’ve, myself as GM and the players, we’ve populated this map. We’ve populated this world that was kind of sketched out in that book.

One of the adventures that I just basically have very vaguely started putting together adventure series is called the Itarian Coast. And it’s the eastern end, eastern to middle of the North Continent’s coast, a major trade road, a lot of history, but not a lot of history, pretty sketchy history.

half formed history and so forth. Because people tell the stories to each other and they get them wrong. I’m not too worried if it’s not exactly right, because that’s how it happens in the real world. You have historians that write stuff down who try hard to make it right. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe they try hard to make it the way they want it. Who knows? But in in the old days and old in old places, you’d have people telling the story and they tell the story that their granddad told them. But who knows how much it’s changed. So I don’t worry too much if I’m not perfect on that stuff.

But going back to the resources available on the website, I mean, there is just so much there. There’s GM screens, character sheets. It’s, what do we call it? An embarrassment of riches. There’s just so much there. So for those seeking to delve deeper into their game, for those seeking things, it’s all there and it’s all available for a free download. These are print on demand books that I’ve got here.

Hereward (30:45.486)
Aside from the new fourth edition book, which is absolutely glorious and such a huge success, my question is, what’s your favorite basic fantasy product? adventure that you like running or?

Thank you.

Chris G (31:01.486)
Been trying to figure out the answer to that question since I saw you ask it. So one thing on the list that you posted to me that I really don’t have an answer for. What I, I like a lot of the stuff. mean, depending on the group, depending on the dynamic. Yeah, there’s a lot of different stuff there that I like. I am rather fond of my own adventures. mean,

I wrote them as it were there. They’re in my voice. They’re they’re my stories, but so I’m not going to try and promote any of those. But JN1, the chaotic caves, it’s a fantastic area. I said it a few miles from Morgan’s Fort off into the inland area to the to the West and the players go back and forth. I actually started a group in one game in the unnamed village that is provided in JN1.

And I used from our AA1 adventure anthology, when I used the beneath Bramasson adventure, which was itself a collaboration, I set it in that village and started my players there before they went in search of the caves themselves. They got.

bored, scared, confused, I don’t know, and went to Morgansford. They didn’t even really finish the chaotic caves area, but that was their decision. They went to Morgansford, they did some of the adventures there. I’ve run, one of the ones I like to run when I have time and space to do it is the Cave of the Unknown from BF1 Morgansford. I like that adventure. I like how it plays out. I’ve only once had a player group go through it and not get caught in the early trap.

I’m not going to tell any more detail than that in case somebody is planning on running it. But, but there is an early trap that catches most player groups. I had one player who made a beeline in the other direction and somehow avoided it. I don’t know how she did it, but she’s like, no, we’re going to go over here. I think this is where I want to go. And I’m like, okay. Yeah. So anyway, I like Jan one I have run, not ranging into monkey aisle. I really probably should at some point run that adventure.

Hereward (33:09.742)
Yeah, I was gonna say actually my I did the classic GM thing of giving my players lots of goodies and then shipwrecking them and taking off all the all the stuff and we shipwrecked them on on Monkey Isle We spent I mean months of play some months on Monkey Isle and an absolute blast

Now, in terms of what I run for like convention games, I have extensively used the CS1 and CS2 contest series modules, Castle, Castle by the Sea and The Dark Temple.

I haven’t done it in a year. Yeah.

Both of those adventure series were created literally the maps were designed to fit on my battle maps. I have a set of battle maps that I use and I designed all the maps to fit on them. So I can run them at a convention game without having to teach anybody how to draw maps. I have a mapping technique. I’ve got a book. Hang on a minute. Let’s see if I can find it over here. There it is. But it’s not a basic fantasy book.

The old, the RPG primer and old school playbook. And, uh, it’s a guide. It’s very thin. It’s a guide provided to help people learn how to play old school games. Um, it describes, explains about how to be, how to be a player. gives a very brief, um, intro into how to be a game master. And there’s a section in there where I explain a technique for describing maps verbally that one of my players worked out with me years ago.

Chris G (34:44.174)
As a consequence, when he’s at the table or anybody that he’s trained, I can talk, talk a map and they can draw it. And that, that’s fantastic. That works great for our table. But when I’m running a game at a convention, I’m not going to try and explain that to anybody. So I work with battle with a map that’ll fit on the battle map. don’t have to worry about it. So I like running those adventures and having a variety of different adventures set on the same maps, which is the whole stick for the count to contest series.

Yeah, I love running those. not just the ones that I, those two, I’ve only written one adventure. One of the CS one adventures is mine. I don’t have anything at all in the dark temple. those are all other players, other game masters designs for the contest. So, but I love running all of them. think they’re, I think they’re fantastic. I haven’t run three days of peace and love yet out of, out of castle by the sea. need to run that, but I don’t know if I can wrap my mind around it. It’s pretty crazy.

I, during the Easter break, I was away with my family and my nieces and nephews. And my niece, who’s 12 years old, was really keen to have a go at role playing games. And she heard a lot. So we ran Golden the Hills from Adventure Anthology 1, which is such a short little mini dungeon and was absolutely perfect as a kind of introduction.

When Ray Allen, he used to use the handle mad dog and I don’t know why he still doesn’t because that’s cool. But when Ray Allen submitted that adventure early on, we had not planned the adventure anthology series. That wasn’t something I’d ever thought about. I had assumed that people submitting adventures would submit full size adventures, 10, 20, 30 pages, that we would put together, individual designers would put together series of adventures, which we have some of those.

All of J.D. Neal’s books are like that. Either bigger adventures or series of adventures that more or less have similar themes and levels. That was what I expected. And this guy comes along and drops this cute little adventure. And it’s like, I can’t publish it in print. It’s too small. What do we do? And the adventure anthology series grew out of that.

Chris G (37:04.518)
And we are going to, we’re going to issue the last AA book, AA3, as an OGL book. We don’t think we can sort out the rights. We don’t have consents from all the authors for that book to change the license to Creative Commons. We need consent from every author to change the license of a book. So it’s going to come out as an OGL book. They haven’t canceled it yet.

So we’re going to put it out hopefully soon, along with a refresh of the first field guide and finally a print version of the second field guide. So those things are hopefully coming soon. they won’t be in the Creative Commons and they won’t have the new cover design because I can’t do it. just can’t. can’t get the people. Some of these people might not even still be alive and they certainly can’t be contacted. I can’t reach them. So we’re going to make do with what we’ve got.

It’s worth pointing out to the listeners, whether it’s a third edition thing such as Adventure Anthology 1, you can see it’s got the crenellations all the way around. And you can tell the fourth edition, because they have a slightly different layout on the cover design, crenellations go all the way around, the wraparound cover. They’re all compatible, aren’t they, Chris?

They are. All editions from the very first edition to the fourth edition remain completely compatible with each other for some definition of completely. They’re not identical. There are little changes between editions, but mechanically they’re the same game. Nobody liked the maneuverability rules that first edition, they got changed in the second, but they’re the same. They’re just noted in a more, in a clearer, easier to understand fashion.

I did a bad job on the first version and I was much happier with the second. We hardly use maneuverability rules except when people are flying. But that happens. We had a major flying scene in my last in-person game. So we had to deal with that stuff. Things like that.

Chris G (39:10.99)
The compatibility, there’s a logo that’s going to be in all of our new books that indicates that they’re all all versions are compatible. And in fact, I just every time somebody asked me about compatibility, I just post a copy of the logo. So. Well, I know I’m not reinvented, but.

One of the things that I love about basic fantasy as well is because it runs off, well, originally was running off the OGL, it is largely compatible with old Dungeons and Dragons modules as well. you know, with a few tweaks here or there, a few nips and tucks, it’s…

I couldn’t say that before. I was literally legally obligated not to say that, but changing to Creative Commons and jumping out of the OG of the OGL gives me some liberty with that. can say that’s intentional. You can take an old BX or BCM, BECM.

Yeah, easy am I the whole you can take those adventures for those older distance, you can take it advanced adventures and they can be adapted, although there’s a little more work involved. But pretty much all the old school stuff from the from the early days in the 80s and even some of the stuff in the 90s will work without too much difficulty in in any of the old school games, not just basic fantasy.

An OGL rule restricted us from using the names of other games, which made things very uncomfortable and inconvenient, but I’m not bound by that rule with respect to this game anymore so.

Hereward (40:43.31)
I mean, for the past few months, I’ve been running the Tree of Life, which is an old D &D module. think it was for, I think it’s a companion level module. And I’ve always wanted to run it. It’s always been one I’d read when I was younger, thinking, oh, that’s so cool. you go to the library and you stuff.

That’s the life is is got a lot of the Mestarin mythos in it doesn’t it?

Yeah, I I’ve swiped it out of Mistara and placed it in the world of Morgansfort. it’s essentially a Venro, the Isle of the Elves is now the Mistara and Elvish kingdom and stuff. it’s a little bit of nipping and tucking here and there, but it fits perfectly. And it’s just a joy to be able to run these older ones using this system.

I’m going to reveal a secret to you. I never liked them in Star and Mythos. I never liked that system. I never liked the whole companion, well, not companion, but the immortals concept or the way that works. And I kind of dodged around that. I’m from the BX era from the version two years before. that never really worked for me. But you know what? It doesn’t matter to me. Your Avonro doesn’t have to look like mine.

It doesn’t have to look at all like mine. In fact, I don’t have any idea what mine looks like because the players have never been there. So at some point or another, they’ll probably get a wild urge. if I’m running another Western lands game right now, I’m not running Western lands campaign. I’ve got two different groups in different, let’s call them parallel versions of my blame campaign. So that’s entertaining too.

Chris G (42:29.1)
But yeah, no, it’s fine. Everybody has their thing and we’re all about accommodating whatever your thing happens to be, unless it’s too freaky, in which case I don’t want hear about it.

Well, I’ve got one more question. So there’s going to be some people coming to Ocon in October who are interested in getting into playing tabletop role-playing games but have never had the chance. Obviously, the sign-ups, when the tickets go on sale in hopefully about a month’s time, there’ll be sign-ups to sign up to these sessions.

So if people are able to sign up to the sessions on time, it’s very likely that their first experience of role-playing games is going to be potentially basic fantasy. So what advice would you give to these people who are interested in giving role-playing and particularly basic fantasy a go? What advice would you give to them starting out?

Relax, have fun with it. Don’t worry if you don’t know all the rules, your game master will help you. The game master doesn’t help you all slap him personally or her because that’s not cool. You gotta help new players. Have fun with it. You’re playing at the convention. If you get your character killed, it’s no big deal. I mean, you should try not to, but don’t panic if it happens. It’s not like the world ends. Have fun with it.

Honestly, the new players may have an advantage over the 5e players because they have no preconceived notions. They have no expectations as to what the game is going to be like. They’re going to learn it from scratch without any anything in their head fighting against playing old school. So they may have it easier. There’s a. Well, you’re familiar, there’s a guy who has a YouTube channel, Seth Sporkowski, and he talks about having a player who.

Chris G (44:26.432)
had played video games and was, and was a big fan of playing video RPGs. And he looked for the rails. He was looking for in every scenario and every, every time he encountered a problem or a task or difficulty in the game, he was looking for how the game master expected him to solve the problem.

And Seth said, but that’s not how he runs games. That’s up to the players to figure out how to solve a problem. There may be some expected possible solutions, but there’s not necessarily one right solution. And this player found the game frustrating and it was unhappy with it because he couldn’t find the rails. He wouldn’t like my game because there’s no rails at all. But that’s the thing is if you have these expectations, they’re going to fight with.

the actual style of the game. So I don’t want to talk to your new players. I want to talk to your five E guys, you five E guys. Relax, have some fun with it. This game is tough. It’s lethal. It’s going to try to kill you. Do not think because you’re playing a player character that you have any plot armor keeping those monsters from eating you alive. Don’t think that you’re going to be up to fighting any particular group you meet. Think tactically. Think.

How do I survive this situation? How do I come out of this situation alive and hopefully ahead? They’re the ones that are going to have the hardest time. The ones who are accustomed to the expectations of the modern games that every monster group that you fight, you can defeat. That everything that you can do is on your character sheet. Those expectations are going to be a problem for those players. For the people who are coming at this without those preconceived notions,

It shouldn’t be too hard for them to catch on to the idea. You’re playing a person, whatever kind of person you are, whether you’re human or halfling or whatever, you’re playing a person in a game world. And yeah, you have things that you’re particularly good at, things you can particularly do well, and maybe things that you’re not allowed to do or that you can’t do very well. But you have things you can do that aren’t written on your character sheet. You have hands, you have feet, you have a brain, you can do things. Think about things, think about the situation. I have…

Chris G (46:42.57)
I have watched players walk through a room without properly examining anything. They don’t even say, we searched through them and you describe the contents of the room to them. it’s like, guys, don’t you really think if you’re looking for hidden treasures, that maybe you should open the drawers or look behind the tapestry or under the bed? You know, this is a room, there’s stuff in here. Look around some, actually describe what you’re doing. Let the game master have something. That’s a lot of it too.

You find traps in a modern game, you roll dice and you either succeeded or you failed. The gore, the game master rolls for you if that’s how your game works, but it’s all on the dice and the description is very secondary. But in a, in an old school game, you know, if there’s a treasure item in a traps drawer, yeah, you, you’re going to check the drawer for traps, but you’re also going to think about maybe my check wasn’t successful. How can I open that drawer without maybe blowing my face off? Can I stand at the side? Can I pull the door open with my sword?

You know what can I do to make this problem less deadly for me if it turns out that there actually is something there. The dice are not always your friends. So you should try to figure out ways to avoid having to roll them any more than you have to. That seems counterintuitive and a lot of the front of the game is getting into a fight, rolling dice and beating up on some ugly monster. That’s great. But. There are times when maybe the best thing to do is to find a way to avoid rolling the dice.

find a way to solve the problem when I happen to do any unnecessary roles. Think about that stuff. That’s my advice. Most important thing is, is y’all are coming to a game convention. No matter what your background is, it’s a convention. Don’t worry about if you die. Don’t worry about if you do something stupid. You probably won’t see these people outside of the convention, so that’s okay. You’re not gonna be too embarrassed. And hey, if you die, you die, but you had the experience.

Yeah.

Chris G (48:39.766)
And if the game has got extra characters, maybe you’re back in again.

I’m going to have a whole folder of spare characters just to toss out as the Chris, thank you so much for your time this evening or this afternoon for you over in Missouri. Maybe in a future Ocon in a year or two’s time, it would be wonderful if we could get you over here to the Isle of Lewis to personally GM a session.

Hold me how far out in middle of nowhere you are. You’re further out in the middle of nowhere than I am. And I thought I was in middle of nowhere. I don’t know if I can make that journey. I sure hope you guys have a good time.

Thank you.