What lured me in & my first adventure
Hello everyone, and welcome back to Delving Wolf!
In today's blog post I figured I'd talk a bit about the reasons that led me to approach the OSR community, and what changes it has sparked in my life.
When I actively entered the world of TTRPGs I only knew about 5e, not unlike most people just entering the hobby; I was only vaguely aware that there were previous editions of D&D (and why should I have cared? They were old, the newest one had to be the best anyway) and I even remember the first time I heard about Pathfinder I told my friend I played with at the time "Did you know there's another TTRPG?" or something similar. Yeah, I know.
But Pathfinder itself never caught my attention, because at the time I knew it as "D&D with more math", so that newfound knowledge remained a seed for some time.
Then, a year or so later, that seed sprouted, and I started exploring the new (to me) and vast world of TTRPGs besides D&D 5e: I spent so much time reading about all these systems that were so different and able to create stories in ways that 5e couldn't even imagine: I remember some of those that caught my attention the most were EZD6, FATE, Blades in the Dark, The One Ring, Masks and Fabula Ultima. Of all of these, I only ended up getting the latter book so far (physically, and Masks only in PDF as part of a Humble Bundle).
But until then, I was still sticking to 5e. It's hard to get out of a strong habit, and the sunk cost fallacy was in full force.
Eventually, though, I got closer to the OSR sphere, and I'm pretty sure Cairn was my gateway into this world: a world where there isn't a million rules for every possible thing that can happen in game, but rather have a framework for the most important aspects, and letting the Referee make a ruling on the spot. So freeing, not having to stop and check the rulebook multiple times per session even after years of playing the same game.
Two other aspects that attracted me immediately are the cross-compatibility of the OSR systems, where you can get an adventure or a module for a game and use it in a bunch of other systems with little to no conversion, and, related to the first, the modularity of the systems: I already enjoyed "homebrewing" in 5e, but here not only it's possible, it's encouraged to take elements from multiple games and mash them together to make the perfect system for your group to have fun with.
Last, but definitely not least, is the community that surrounds these games: the feeling that brings everyone together, the neverending sharing of content like tables, opinions, adventures, the blogs (the reason that prompted me to start this blog in the first place) and the community projects, a perfect example of which is the Zungeon Jam 2025: a project born from the idea that making a dungeon (or in this case a zine dungeon, hence the term zungeon) has to be demystified, it's not something that's super hard to make, it can be easy and, more importantly, fun!
I have been writing down prompts or ideas for adventures, classes, magic items and other things for a while now, but it never went past the phase of jotting down a few ideas because of that prejudice I had, and this project is the reason I finally decided to make something and actually publish it: so, without spending too much time on it, after generating the basic 6 room layout as suggested in the blogpost that started it all, I rolled a few times on random tables until I had a fun idea in mind, started drawing a map, came up with descriptions for the various rooms, scanned said hand-drawn map, put it all together with Scribus (a free layout software I never used before, I don't have Affinity Publisher) and so my first module was born!
Next week my post will be dedicated to my first time trying solo TTRPGing, doing so in an OSR game and the lessons I learned from it, so stay tuned!
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