Worlds Funsome and Free: Understanding Open Role-Play Adventures

The following is mainly available in various pdf and text formats on my itch.io page, but some folks also like having it available in blog form, so here tis'.

 

 

What is This About?

At its most essential, Open Role-Play Adventure – ORPA for short – is tabletop role-playing achieved primarily through open discussion and impromptu judgments, rather than through recourse to pre-codified rule systems, as it was done in the earliest days of the medium before such systems existed. Very often this style of play prioritizes the evocation of a world as a believably living place, experienced vividly through description and collaboration – representational game mechanics used only as discretionary tools in the cause of that, not as the focus of play in themselves.

 

Core Precepts

There’s no such thing as an ORPA rulebook – it’s a practice of play, through which  one may approach any setting or campaign premise, not a category of product or a school of design.

When organizing a campaign by this practice, the main purpose is to convey a credible world and bring it to life through aesthetics and description, rather than by simulating it mechanically.

In play, the first recourse for resolving game events is discussion, negotiation, and judgment. Abstract or representational mechanics may be taken up to enhance those methods, but never to replace them.

Authority over play (both in terms of lore and rules) arises solely from the people at the table, directed by a fair referee trusted to make final decisions, rather than from the sanction of a third-party text or organization.

ORPA Step-by-Step

Much of the following section is based on writing by Alyx Ghazarian on their blog Underground Adventures.

Start with a world to explore, not a rules system. Take any book, movie, or show that excites you as your “sourcebook.” Even a setting from a traditional RPG if you like. Or make up a world yourself, on your own or brainstorming with your players.

Ask how things work in this world. What do people eat? Who would be met along a road? What do they celebrate? What do they mourn? Where do problems come from? Who’s expected to solve them? Draw maps. Make lists of interesting places, people, things. Note situations going on that characters may want to get involved in.

You’ll want oracles to help fill out small details when they come up. Make or find random tables on interesting subjects – cargoes a caravan might be hauling, names for spaceport taverns,  villages with peculiarities, names of people, things to encounter in the wilderness.

Introduce the players to the world. Not all of it at once, only what’s directly relevant at the start of play. Then, make characters. Ask questions of the players, have them write down their answers. On simple index cards, not fancy character sheets. Where is their character from? How did they get where they are now? What are they particularly good at? What do they want to achieve? A bit of description, a few notable proficiencies, some equipment, but keep it brief. Use words, not numbers.

To commence playing the game in earnest, present the players with a situation that will compel them to respond.

As you play, prompt the players to ask questions about what’s around them and what’s going on. Answer in ways that expand the world. Convey information fairly so the players can make meaningful decisions. When you need details for an answer, use an oracle.

Don’t push a story to happen, don’t try to follow a plot. Explore where events lead naturally. Nobody knows what will happen next – that's what makes this kind of game unique.

When it comes time to decide how something uncertain turns out, ask yourself, “given the nature of this part of the world under these conditions, what most likely occurs? How does who the characters are and what they’re doing change that?” It’s good to open up discussion to the table, but don’t dither – settle the matter and get on with the action.

Be sure of the characters’ intentions behind what they say and do, and that they understand the stakes before you make a ruling on the consequences. Be impartial but firm.

Go ahead and roll dice if you want, it’s fun! But only ask questions of the dice you’re willing to let them answer, and commit to those answers. 
Use dice in simple ways at first, just one or two six-siders – “The ancient text is really obscure, you’ve got a 1 in 6 chance to decipher it” or “it’s a big door, but you’re really strong, a 7 or better on two dice forces it open.”  The simpler the rolls, the quicker the flow of the game. Don’t get side-tracked calculating exact odds or nailing down every variable. Stay fast and loose, fast and loose.

Do you want more detailed rules to help figure out what happens? Let them emerge naturally, making them up on-the-spot. But remember, the world and making it feel alive comes first.

Do you need ideas for rules? Ransack any game, not just RPGs – pluck whichever ones catch your fancy, but just those, don’t pull in whole systems you weren’t looking for.

Don't worry about fitting new rules together with old ones, that’ll sort itself out. You’ll forget the ones that don’t fit, and come back to the ones that do, and think up ways to draw connections between them when you need to.

When you think of a better rule, or find one somewhere, use it as soon as you want. If you feel you didn’t need a rule for something after all, drop it. You’re not obligated to keep to a set system.

Avoid “rules speak,” both at the table and in your notes. Refer to things how someone on the world would speak of them, don’t worry about nailing them down objectively – at the table, everything is subjective.

As the Referee, portray a credible world and convey the information needed by the players to interact with it in a fitting manner.  Weigh all factors of events in the game, listen to the players’ reasonable responses to those events, answer their questions about them, and judge the outcomes in a manner that is fair both to the characters and to the validity of the world you’re playing in. If you use a rule to decide something, what it says happens is still your responsibility.

As a Player, you are responsible for your own fun. Express yourself, immerse yourself in the experience, encourage others, let the table know if something bothers you. Don’t look to your character sheet for answers. Imagine what you would do in the situation, and act on it. Pursue what interests you, go where the excitement is. Trust the referee and your fellow players.

 

Historical Context

Open Adventure Role-Play has hitherto been widely known as FKR, a term coined in 2015 by Mike Monard, one of the first ever players of D&D, in resistance to mounting assumptions that he identified with the OSR scene: 

"I am not now, nor have I ever been, part of the "Old School Renaissance." This is because I've simply never stopped playing [Original D&D] the way I always have. No rebirth involved. However, one of the bases of Braunstein, then Blackmoor, then Greyhawk, was the concept of "Free Kriegspiel," where the referee's judgment is the supreme authority, not a set of written rules. This fine tradition has all but died out. It needs desperately to be brought back. Therefore I hereby announce the launch of the "Free Kriegspiel Renaissance," or FKR. And yeah, it's pronounced exactly the way you think. So come on, let's be a bunch of FKRs!" 

Before Monard co-opted the term for a rude joke, "Free Kriegspiel" meant a type of war-game developed in the military academies of 19th century Europe – "kriegspiel" literally being German for "war-game." Originally, it was a tool to teach strategy, tactics, and logistics to officer cadets. But those cadets too often pursued technical victories through exploits of the abstract rules of play, rather than learning how real battles actually worked as intended. To remedy this, the idea of running the games entirely subjectively was introduced, Free as in "open-ended," the progress of the simulated battles determined not by blind rules, but by the moment-to-moment independent judgment of experienced officers overseeing the game as referees.

In 1967, avid hobby war-gamer David Wesely experimented with Free Kriegspiel approaches for a scenario set in Braunstein, a fictional Napoleonic-era town. The scenario’s opening preamble involved lone agents of different factions vying to influence circumstances leading up to the arrival of two armies, expected to be followed by a standard battle when those armies at last met.

At first Wesely regarded his scenario a failure because, rather than pursuing strategic goals, the characters became embroiled in petty rivalries and never got around to the actual battle. But the players loved the immediacy of playing distinct characters rather than military units and clamored for more. Soon further “Braunstein” games were organized by Wesely and his peers, leading to variations in other settings, including a medieval fantasy duchy named Blackmoor – run by a young fellow named Dave Arneson, who introduced the game to another war-game hobbyist, Gary Gygax.

Practices developed by Arneson in his Blackmoor game would be emulated by Gygax in a fantasy campaign called Greyhawk, leading directly to the creation of Dungeons & Dragons in 1974.

The original iteration of D&D conceived of play following the same broadly open-ended approach as previous “Braunsteins.” But the authors, writing for what was expected to be only a small audience of war-gamers already familiar with such practices, neglected to state this outright in the text. Thus, when the game spread to a far wider multitude entirely unfamiliar with war-gaming and Free Kriegspiel in particular, new players were left to bridge this conceptual gap on their own, focusing on what explicit rules text there was, imposing objective interpretations onto subjective systems. Even as the original pre-D&D role-players (such as Mike Monard) continued in their free-flowing style, methodically passing their practices along through direct demonstration, a separately parallel (but larger) audience of tabletop role-players coalesced around the expectation that rules formulated by “official” designers were of central importance to play – which turned out to present a much more lucrative market for game publishers, pulling the hobby away from founding precepts.

The composer of this document feels the joke behind the name “FKR” has worn thin, and further that it leads too often to confusion with actual Kriegspiel, still played in the original Prussian style in many places. Thus the alternative title, Open Role-Play Adventure.

 

Not Necessarily “Rules-Light”

A prevalent assumption about ORPA/FKR is that it’s just another kind of “rules-light” role-playing, but Justin Hamilton, on his blog Aboleth Overlords, deftly disputes this: 

"The FKR movements tend to primarily focus on very small rulesets – often stuff like “d6 roll for low” or contested 2d6 rolls, just because these kinds of rulesets allow the referee to really focus in on rulings..."

"So from the outside lots of people are starting to assume the FKR means nearly no-rules roleplaying games. But if you look at Kriegsspiel itself, or even the kind of rulesets Arneson seemed fond of writing – sometimes there are a lot of rules. And this to me is important to note. It’s not the amount of rules."

"FKR to me is purely a relationship to rules. If your table is composed of a referee who portrays the world opting to use rules as a tool however they wish, and players portraying characters responding with what they would do if they were in whatever fictional situation the ref is describing – that to me is FKR. It doesn’t matter if the ref is using a single coin flip, or if they decide to sometimes opt into Mythras, or their own hack of Advanced Squad Leader, or anything else. The amount of crunch doesn’t impact the FKR-ishness, it’s if the table is focusing more on the fiction over the mechanics. This is obviously easier with light systems, but if the ref feels like using something heftier “behind the screen”, that’s a perfectly valid approach." 

It also doesn’t matter want kind of rules are used. David Wesely and his peers drew from war-games because that’s where their familiarity lay – thus why D&D had so many mechanics copied from old naval fleet games. If you’re more familiar with boardgames, draw from them. Or card games, or theater, or African storytelling traditions. Whatever works for you.

 

Appeals of the Style

It offers an escape from gamification – a chance to Play as in Celebrate, not Play as in Compete. Most anyone who’s run a typical role-playing game has known the frustration of seeing players respond to every situation, no matter how expressively presented, by numbly pouring over the numbers on their character-sheets like dull accountants managing cost-benefit ratios, looking for the “correct” mechanical solution (1). Even ostensibly narrative-focused role-playing games are vulnerable to this, often representing story elements through currency that players can still come to regard in transactional terms. To paraphrase Campbell's Law: when a quantitative abstraction becomes the primary means of interacting with an in-world factor, players will come to only think of manipulating the abstraction rather than engaging with what it originally represented. The immediacy of an assassin flashing a razor-sharp knife inches from your bare throat is dulled when that becomes merely a defense check roll with a -2 penalty against 2d8 damage. 

(1 “Joe, the next time you answer What Do You Do? by looking down and showing us all your bald spot, I’m bouncing the biggest die on the table off it.”) 

The experience is de-commodified. In a world straining under an increasing preponderance of commercialization, where once purely social practices are more and more assimilated into corporate revenue streams and advertising intrudes deeper into every spare moment of our time, ORPA offers a way to reassert the eminence of personal imagination. It’s home-crafted and self-reliant, a DIY folk-art experience. You don’t need any official materials – your worlds, adventures, and even rules are entirely yours to create and explore. Not to say that an ORPA table is purged of all flashy bits and convenient accessories – maps are useful, pretty dice are fun, and miniature figures are cool. But they aren’t the point of play – paper and pencils and your imagination are all you really need.

"The most stimulating part of the game is the fact that anything can happen. Nothing is impossible.(2)" The potential for tactical infinity is maximized. In nearly every other form of game – and mediums of expression in general – your potential interactions, and the responses of the work to those actions, is tightly curtailed.  In a book, your point of view is rigidly controlled by the author, the progression of events preordained. In a board-game, your choices are delineated by your current hand of cards and the layout of the board or some-such. Even most role-playing games, despite their comparatively open-ended nature,  impose such limits, often to focus creativity, but sometimes just to motivate you to buy the next book of power-ups. In ORPA, all things are negotiable and unscripted. 

(2 Tim Waddell, The Space Gamer #2 1975, "Reviews of Dungeons & Dragons")

 

Challenges of the Style

This won’t appeal to everyone. There are several things otherwise common in the contemporary field of tabletop gaming, enjoyed by many, which ORPA doesn’t feature – glossy books and other branded knick-knacks to show off, the challenge of system mastery and mechanized character-optimization, the satisfying click of multi-stage rules interacting, the thrill of filling up a character sheet with incrementally unlocked powers. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying those things, but there are plenty of other styles of play, with games written around them, delivering them much better.

It requires a high level of mutual trust – besides being socially comfortable with one another, and recognizing communal responsibility for their own fun, participants must accept (and demand) that the referee is an emotionally mature adult capable of negotiating fairly towards justified decisions, and that the players are similarly capable of communicating reasonably and accepting compromises. This of course is the case for any TTRPG, but ORPA needs that as the first and over-arching priority.

Your ORPA will vary. Beyond the core precepts, there’s no one right way to play. Everything about it is subjective, up to personal preference, developing particularly per the circumstances of each table. Meaning it can be difficult to translate games in this style between groups. Cultivating your own take unique from anyone else is creatively satisfying and fun, but it can also be isolating.

Because the Referee regards everything on a case-by-case basis, and rules aren’t cemented, the game won’t allow players to settle into grooves of prompted decisions along paths laid out on their character sheets. For players whose happy place is self-reinforcing loops, this can become very frustrating.

Players coming from mainstream TTRPGs may feel adrift without numerically definitive traits to ensure their characters’ effectiveness, or obvious levers for pushing and pulling on the fiction. Some may even feel vulnerable without explicit protections against potentially domineering referees. The potential for abuse does exist, as it will wherever a level of trust is presumed. But that’s not unique to this style. Adversarial GMing habits are toxic regardless of the game or school of play – even the most well-designed rule can’t solve belligerence or turn a bad sport honest. In the face of that, every player always has the most fundamental defense – to leave the table.

Be wary of commercial games marketed under an FKR label. Though usually well-intentioned, they’re erroneous, mostly just conventional OSR-adjacent rules-light systems following a buzzword (3). Unfortunately, even while repeating slogans like “rulings not rules” and “play at the world” they come largely from the sort of “text-first” assumptions which proliferated following D&D’s initial publication. To reiterate: FKR/ORPA is an approach to running any table, not a product type in itself, and it doesn’t start with any rulebook. 

(3 Heck, I’m no better, my first draft of this document was mostly a rule system, and it’s taken a dozen revisions to resist the instinct to present things that way.)

 

Ancillary Commentary

Explaining what to some seems an eccentric approach to role-playing games, my ever further move away from standardized rule systems, what this FKR thing is I’m always on about, and why I’m now calling it ORPA, was turning into an expanding lecture with a lot of “well actually I also need to explain…” Thus this relatively brief “How To” summary I can instead present to interested parties all at once.

How did I get here? I’ve never really been much interested in rules-mastery or min-maxing, always more excited by theme and immersion. I often experienced game rules as occluding presences, self-justifying intercessions into the campaign world, formalities to get through on the way to the actual fun of communal collaboration. To be clear, I'm not saying rules were always bad, but I ended up gritting my teeth through a lot of tedious play while the rest of the table insisted “the book says we have to do things this way.” When the OSR came about, its precepts of “world first” and “rulings not rules” struck a deep chord – and when the subsequent FKR followed those ideas to full adoption, of course I dove in.

Now some advice which seemed a little too opinionated to include in the main body:

In my estimation, people who read for lyrical pleasure are the best potential fit for ORPA, while those who pursue gaming mainly on competitive terms … not so much. Or to frame it more glibly: a good prospect for ORPA play can express well-considered opinions on several authors and has penned some decent fan-fiction. While a non-ideal one has cases upon cases of Magic cards but hasn’t read the flavor text on a single one. Keep this in mind when considering potential players from your local gaming community.

Though workable, I’ve found one-shots at conventions are not the ideal way to present ORPA. To shine best, the practice really needs a mutually familiar group of players in an ongoing campaign over multiple sessions where practices of the table have time to develop and accrue to taste.

As a referee, my most reliable tool for putting players into immediately engaging situations is the old adage, “Good, Fast, or Cheap, pick two.” Give them a chance to proceed but only by choosing from an array of potential costs. “You can power down the central core, but doing so means killing the main reactor. You can link your compu-deck to prevent that, but doing so will overwrite it. Or you can take longer to hack it all carefully, but those security-drones are getting close. Which will it be?”  I particularly like time pressures, they keep the pace up. Over the years, I’ve gotten far more productive use from this informal approach than I have from any precisely formulated rule mechanic.

Remember, the Perfect is the enemy of the Good. Rules-hacking can be a seductive preoccupation, and its easy for a Referee, especially one with a long-standing interest in game design, to fall into fussing over fine-tuning systems towards theoretical white-room perfection far past their actual play benefit. In practice, simple, direct and immediate resolution informed by mutually clear understanding of stakes and consequences is always more useful than any alleged mechanical nuance or long-term pay-off.

Worlds Funsome and Free: Understanding Open Role-Play Adventure

version 1.0

Composed by Ethric T.S.

Plain Paper Gamer

ethric-t-s.itch.io/

https://dice.camp/@E_T_Smith

How to Make a God of the Hyborian Age

Well hey, long time no blog.

I've lately been getting back into the Hyborian Age, the setting of the stories of Conan of Cimmeria, and putting together a world digest for FKR-style play. Mostly this has involved pulling in whatever descriptions from various sources seem most pleasing. There's been a lot written about Conan and his world since Robert E. Howard's first story about the character published in 1932. Much of it contradictory, some of it downright silly. Largely I find the variance useful, because it means I don't have to worry at all about "accuracy," and there's precedent for making up my own crap to throw into the mix. To appropriate something often said about Glorantha, "your Hyborian Age will vary."

Case in point -- Robert E. Howard makes briefest mention of Amazon in his foundational description of the Hyborian Age, one of the African-themed Black Kingdoms. Literally no more than a name, it never appeared in any of the stories he wrote, or any of his unpublished drafts. Inevitably, later pastiches expanded on Amazon by depicting it as an oppressive matriarchy as conceived by a bitterly divorced man, annoyingly typical in adventure fiction of the 70s and 80s. I still wanted to put Amazon on the map, but in a more palatable style, so I've made it a nation of grassland nomads, aloof to outsiders and with a deep hatred for slavers. To foreshadow Amazon myths that would appear in "later" history, I kept the idea of women having high-status in its society through martial prowess, by framing a class of hunters riding saber-toothed cats.

To complete the sketch, I had to ask who they worshiped, and I wanted something unique reflecting their culture, not just slotting one of the established gods into the role. And this entailed evaluating how gods in the Hyborian Age are presented. Broadly, there are two established approaches:

* "Real" gods, who feel more or less in tone with how actual humans conceived divinities in ancient times, entailing priests and temples, the gods themselves never seen directly, more concepts than beings. Conan's often-invoked patron Crom, the "voluptuous" Ishtar, and the paternalistic Mitra are all in this style.

* "Pulp" gods, who are basically bundles of lurid description aimed at supporting the plot of a particular story or two. Yog, the cannibalistic "lord of empty abodes" (and obvious allusion to Yog-Sothoth of the Cthulhu mythos) and Ollam-Onga of Gazal are solidly in this style. 

I don't see much point in adding further pulp gods to the digest ahead of time -- as said, they're plot-specific, and seem mainly to come up when protagonists stumble into a lost city or isolated tribe and have to deal with its profane cult that'll never be seen again. "Our fearsome lord Zkta, the wasp god, hungers for your sacrifice! Hear the approaching thrum of his wings!"

As alluded, one of the consistent themes of the Hyborian Age is elements from our actual history foreshadowed in the setting, ostensibly because these elements are echoes of the forgotten epoch repeating in later ages. And that applies especially to its gods, many of whom are outright versions of real historical gods. There is an implication that these gods are still in a raw state, their myths not yet fully formed, or they are destined to fade from the world leaving only fragmentary lore. Some are notably absent -- the classic gods of Olympus and Asgard -- presumably because they haven't developed yet (and in the the battles between the mortal Aesir and Vanir tribes of Nordheim, we're clearly seeing the genesis of the myths that will one day give rise to that pantheon). 

So with that in mind I dug into mythology, and decided to draw from the Titans of Greece, the deities who preceded the Olympians, since the Amazons are associated with those myths. In a spark of inspiration, I decided Amazon would have twin sister gods, worshiped in tandem, representing contrasting but complimenting aspects of their culture. For the more civilized aspect, I settled on Themis, the "sober-looking personification of justice, divine order, law, and custom," inspiration for the Blind Justice statue of so many courthouses. Also, in a happy coincidence, likely the source of the name Themyscira for the island of the Amazons (Wonder Woman's birthplace) in DC Comics. 

For the other half of the duo, I wanted a hunter-warrior goddess, and chose Tethys. Little of her lore has survived to the modern day, she's mainly known as the wife of Oceanus and mother of many river gods, and a preferred artistic subject on the walls of baths. It was an interesting notion that she had been something wilder in the distant past, and that her association with water was only one small aspect of her originally. 

Futz with the spelling of the names a bit to evoke the sense of earlier iterations, and I ended up with the following:

Temis: The teacher of rhetoric, the giver of proper custom, bearer of strategic wisdom, who holds the judge’s baton. One of the twin goddesses of the Amazons, on all altars she stands beside and equally with her sister Tethis.

Tethis: The master hunter, speaker to animals, knower of the ways through wildlands, finder of water, giver of strength in battle, who carries the first spear. One of the twin goddesses of the Amazons, on all altars she stands beside and equally with her sister Temis.

They fit into the Hyborian Age rather well, I think.

 

Group shot of the gods from Marvel Comics 1986 Official Handbook of the Conan Universe. I'm pretty sure which ones are Adonis, Crom, Bori, Mitra, Gullah, Ymir, Ishtar, Yog, Set and Derketa ... but I've no idea whot the liitle guys lurking in both lower corners are.

 

 

 

 

 

The Many Returns of Gamma World

I started this post planning to examine my growing interest in the roleplaying game Gamma World, after having only been casually appreciative of it previously. However, I kept getting side-tracked making comparisons between the uncommonly multitudinous versions of the game. Eventually I realized that the long tenacious publishing history of GW is part of it’s charm, so I’m going to fully indulge this tangent before getting back to the main subject later.

"Edition zero” for Gamma World was Metamorphosis Alpha, written by James M. Ward and published by TSR in 1976. Inspired by science fiction novels such as Brian Aldiss’s Non-Stop and Robert Heinlein's Orphans in the Sky, MA was about primitive humans, many of them bizarrely mutated, exploring a strange and hostile enclosed world littered with inexplicable devices. Eventually the characters realize they are in a vast multi-generation space vessel (the starship “Warden,” 13 miles long, 7 miles wide, and 17 levels tall) lost adrift after a cataclysm decimated it’s population centuries before. By modern standards, MA is a very skimpy game system, just 34 pages (in an admittedly cramped and tiny font) with a handful of rules for a few specific situations, a lot of description of the Warden, and everything else left for the referee to fill in.

In 1978 Ward and Gary Jaquet took the general concepts of Metamorphsis Alpha and filled them out with a few ideas from D&D (mostly the Basic version) to produce the first edition of Gamma World proper (expanded to 56 pages and boxed with a spiffy continental map). While keeping the core concept of low-tech often-mutated humanoids poking around a twisted landscape hoping to unearth high-tech loot, the game swapped out the starship setting for post-apocalyptic planet Earth, retaining the ray-guns and robots of MA by saying the world had reached a scientifically sophisticated age before being blasted by a nuclear fire. 

In getting away from the restraints inherent to MA’s premise (can't really repeat the "you're actually on a spaceship" big reveal to your players after the first time) this change of setting carved out a unique new post-apocalyptic subgenre, where the world-before was just as strange to the players as it’s mutated present-day. It also created the unique opportunity for a referee to build campaigns by "Gammafying" their hometown, taking their local mundane roadmap and twisting once familiar landmarks and names first through a lens of techno-wonder and then another of irradiated-savagery. 

First Edition boxed set cover.

Though it didn't enjoy the same runaway success as D&D, there was consistent interest in the game, and a fondness for it among the staff at TSR. So in 1983 Gamma World got a 2^nd edition, also credited to Ward and Jaquet with an additional credit for James Ritchie, though it was largely just a cosmetic upgrade with more colorful art and a handful of rules expansions. Mostly it was mechanically the same as 1^st edition, albeit with more elaborate accouterments in it's boxed set.

The first big change came in 1985 with the 3^rd edition, which massively rewrote the rules around a color-coded universal resolution chart which had been a feature of the hit Marvel Super Heroes role-playing game the previous year. Unfortunately the change was poorly implemented, and the game text was rife with typos and outright omissions. This edition was still mainly credited to Ward and Jaquet, but I get the impression there were some interfering mandates from higher up in the company.

The 3^rd edition debacle ushered in an odd tradition for Gamma World, where whoever was publishing D&D at the time would use the GW brand to promote an entirely new rules system, or as a pitching ground for concepts being considered for the next iteration of D&D. I suppose it makes sense from a marketing perspective; there's enough name recognition to pull in an audience, but without risking the flagship brand to test the waters. As a result, counting up from Metamorphosis Alpha, there have been at least 10 distinct versions of the game so far, many of them with very different rules from each other.

They can be broadly divided into "Original Rules" (MA up through 2^nd edition) and "New and Different Every Time." Most of the "New and Different" versions have their good and bad points, but some have been utter boondoggles. 

As mentioned 1985’s "universal chart" 3^rd edition stumbled out the gate, and 2003’s 6^th edition was a poorly received sprawling “grim & gritty” re-imagining (licensed out to White Wolf through their D20-focussed imprint Sword & Sorcery Studios) . But if you didn’t like the last edition of Gamma World, you only had to wait a few years; there was bound to be another before long.

So ... starting chronologically from the left: 2nd edition (1983), 3rd edition (1985), 4th edition (1992), "Metamorphosis Alpha to Omega" for the Amazing Engine rules (1994), Gamma World Alternity/5th edition (2000), Omega World (2002), Gamma World D20/6th edition (2003), and last so far 7th edition (2010).

 

Personally my interest has mainly been peaked by the "original rules" era, particularly 1^st edition GW, with some clarifications lifted from 2^nd edition (it’s only some eye-straining formatting and a lack of a print-on-demand option disinclining me from settling onto the 2^nd edition text entirely). As an old-schooler it's no surprise I like the earlier more succinct versions, but I also have a fondness for 1992’s 4^th edition (credited to Ward and Bruce Nesmith) since it was the first version of the game I ever owned and played, and I still have my original copy (it’s got some nice expanded systems for character-creation without getting too complicated, but its resources for the referee are lacking).

2002’s Omega World, the first version by TSR's successor Wizards of the Coast was published as an article in Polyhedron #153, designed by Jonathan Tweet himself. It's a well-regarded fast-and-dirty conversion of the core concepts to the D20 system . 

There are also many fans of 2010’s 7^th edition, a wild and woolly and very random take built from the rules of D&D 4^th edition (leading some to refer to it erroneously as “4^th edition Gamma World”). All editions are currently available online through various venues, most of them legitimate, so you can easily compare and choose for yourself.

Admirably, the tone has been consistent across all these versions (with the exception of 2003's 6^th edition), presenting a wild and wahoo world of science fantasy where characters imbued with strange powers are as short-lived as they are unique.

Two addendums worth mentioning:

• James M. Ward eventually got back the exclusive rights to Metamorphosis Alpha and re-published the game first on his own, and them in 2014 joined up with Goodman Games to create a line of professionally designed supplements for it, more than were made for any single version of GW.
• In 2008 Goblinoid Games published Mutant Future, an OGL retro-clone of GW itself derived from Labyrinth Lord, their retro-clone of Basic/Expert D&D. So arguably that makes 11 total versions so far.

Rusty-Bladed Veterans ... Revised!

I'd been meaning to get back to "Rusty-Bladed Veterans," my hack of "Searchers of the Unknown," and I've finally managed to do it.

If you're unfamiliar, "Searchers of the Unknown" is a clever one-page OSR rules option written by Nicolas Dessaux, built around the idea that if the referee can use a single succinct line of monster stats to portray an NPC warrior, you don't really need anything more for a PC. Nearly exactly two year's ago, I was compelled to offer my own variation, "Rusty-Bladed Veterans."  And now I've finally gotten around to sprucing it up a bit.

Click on this image to Download the PDF

Besides generally clarifying the wording, there are a handful of specific rules changes: 

• Added range modifiers. The original document didn't really address ranged attacks besides listing them as a possible weapon choice.
  
• Added an armor penalty to the cost of HP-based spell-casting, 9 - Worn AC. This gives another reason to go with a sparsely armored character.
• Put some explanatory text on the Movement rating, also implemented a simplifying house-rule to movement I've occasionally applied to B/X.
• Expanded the advancement range up to 8 Hit Dice
  
• Removed the awkward in-combat healing rule. There really was no precedent for it in B/X, and it was a bit fussy to implement in practice. 
• Removed the extra-attacks for higher HD. Again, because they weren't really authentic to the B/X style. I did however keep the bonus attack for killing a foe, because there is some tradition of that in old-school D&D, and it's an easy compensation for lack of room-clearing magic-users in the party.
  

More discreetly, I nudged things a bit to push an implicit niche selection: make a low-AC veteran if you want to be all about combat, go with high-AC if you want to be skillful or aspire to  focus on magic (or at least the ramshackle version that veteran's can manage).

Another issue addressed was how the original "Searchers of the Unknown" arbitrarily replaced some B/X procedures for the referee while leaving others unaddressed. For this revision, I went with the assumption that the "rusty-bladed" rules are entirely player facing, and the referee will be defaulting to the main B/X texts for resources and guidelines. 

As I said with the first version, for a one-shot or short campaign "Rusted-Bladed  Veterans" arguably has some advantages over original B/X, since it's much easier for players to jump in, and it actively follows an often-touted but rarely implemented OSR ideal: putting the emphasis on what the character achieves in play rather than what's on their character sheet.

The Besswox Design Notes which will not be in Beeswox

I've reached the point in assembling Beeswox (a flippintly-launched project I envisioned as taking a couple weeks which is now in its sixth month) of cutting things out to fit in my self-imposed limit of 64 pages (the traditional max size for saddle-stitch binding).

One of the bigger cuts is an appendix of design notes I intended for the last page. Normally I'm a big proponent of the writer taking a moment to explicitly explain how they approached the design and what they want it to do. But under my tight limits, I couldn't justify spending the space on what was essentially a reiteration things said elsewhere (PbtA rules are nothing if not explicit in their process) with some admittedly indulgent proselytizing on top.

But still, I sweated over it enough that I hate to just dump it unseen, so here it is for future posterity (or embarrassment).

Design Notes

Beeswox was more or less begat by Offworlders, a space-adventure WoX-based game with some clever ideas for handling wealth and equipment. It offered a nimble and versatile system that, with just a little work, was easily turned to all sorts of genres and settings. In pursuing that expansion I incorporated bits from other WoX games and useful elaborations from the main Powered by the Apocalypse school. Putting all that together turned into this unified generic WoX rules-set I hadn’t realized I wanted.

But why “World of X” at all? Why the ultra-lite fringe offshoot instead of the more prestigious main PbtA family it spawned from? As much as I respect the excellent work that has gone into many PbtA games, in practice I’ve found moving through their various formalized processes is a bit too esoteric for me. However, approaching those same excellent design principles through traditional elements like Hit Points, Experience Points and damage-rolls comes very easily.

Also, I’m all about minimal rules systems. Role-playing games for me are, before anything else, social gatherings for sharing imagination. The play I enjoy the most is filled with surprises and improvisation and joy sparked by communal creativity. And ever since I first put aside my D&D books in favor of Tunnels & Trolls, I’ve felt that using the fewest rules necessary encourages a focus on the natural conversation where all that great stuff happens. I prefer a sparse toolbox: some guidelines to structure the session, prompts to help the participants imagine the hell out of things, consequences to give a thrill of danger, and spurs to keep the pace up. Anything beyond that drags on momentum.

A significant secondary influence on Beeswox is the “Old School Renaissance.” Of course, given that the first WoX game, World of Dungeons, is a direct evocation of original D&D, and Offworlders is a near-emulation of original Traveller, not much more fine-tuning was needed in that direction, besides making allowances for open-table campaigning.

The Beeswox Thickens

I'm still chugging along at Beeswox, in fact writing (re-writing, and re-re-writing...) the text has become my primary quarantine pastime. I'm hopeful I'll be able to release it by the end of May.

I'd like to make a couple updates on previous posts about Beeswox.

 First, I've modified Verve a bit. To review, it's a pool of points a player spends to activate their character's special abilities. I referred to them as a fixed allowance for "doing an awesome" a number of times per session. But while that mostly worked, it still felt a little abrupt. I don't entirely agree with Dissociated Mechanics criticisms, but Verve was feeling like it suffered from that a bit. Eventually I realized that, if the problem was the artificiality of the hard terminus, then I could just make that line much softer. So now, after a player runs out of Verve, they can still use their abilities, but the referee can optionally impose side effects, call for rolls of the dice, or whatever. I'm much more comfortable with the mechanic now.

Second, I've redone the cover ... twice. While I liked the last design, the dice images on it increasingly struck me as sloppy, and I couldn't verify their copyright permissions. So I stacked every ivory or yellow-toned d6 I had, took a picture with my cheap phone and made a new arrangement on top of the image. I admit it's a little goofy, but that just makes me like it more:

 

Then, while digging up graphic resources, I found a great color photo in the Flickr Commons. But I didn't have a place for it, until I took it as a prompt to make an alternate minimalist cover:

The stark "all-business" contrast to the original cover amuses me, so when it comes time to offer POD, I'll post both versions.

Subtle Verve

In putting together Beeswox, I ended up adding a couple rules without precedent from the original sources, but I feel they tighten up the system as a whole.

In full PbtA games nearly all character actions and resources are expressed as Moves, little distinct resolution packets that broadly define an action and its potential outcomes. A typical Move is structured more or less like this:

In situation X, roll the dice and add Attribute Y to see if Z1, Z2 or Z3 happens.

In contrast, WoX doesn't use Moves. Instead, for broad actions that any character can attempt it uses simplified general-purpose attribute rolls, results interpreted on the spot based on context. Unique PC resources are expressed by Abilities, which are structured tersely:

Your character can do Z.

As I thought about it, that seemed too broad. Without the "in situation X" limit, there's really nothing to urge a player to consider if an ability is appropriate or not. Some implementations account for this by saying "you can attempt to do Y," but that implies anyone without the ability can't attempt it all, which is a headache of permissions to track.

Other Abilities do add an "in situation X" limit, but on consideration I decided against expanding that to all Abilities because it would have been more text to track in play.

My solution is to give PC's a pool of points, called Verve. New characters start with three, they regenerate to full at the start of each session (one of the things you can get when you advance is an improved Verve pool). To use most Abilities, the player has to spend a Verve point (Abilities of more limited scope are just always on). Basically, each session a player can buy a limited number of pre-defined "I do an awesome" moments, enough for their character to shine but not so many as to bury the developing fiction under spam-attacks.

Pretty simple as a pacing mechanic, and I think it does what I want. However, I was concerned that there really isn't a precedent for this in either PbtA or WoX (that I know of), so I asked around for input. Most replies I got felt it seemed workable, but were concerned it might make play feel like Fate.

That may be true from a very broad perspective, but I don't think it will come close in the details. One of the things I find off-putting about Fate is that keeping on top of the flow of Fate Points and all the Aspects producing and consuming them in a scene can lead to disconnection from the fiction. Players can end up intent on making things happen, but without actually experiencing it viscerally. Big moments become just an exercise in cultivating and deploying Fate Points efficiently. I deliberately set up Verve to have no economy flow to avoid that.