Old School, New School, i guess i'm a dropout

I have spent the last several months re-immersing myself in the OSR and familiarizing myself with its NSR branch. I read blogs, modules, and games. I listened to many podcasts and watched a fair few videos. Understanding more deeply the way people engaged with these games, I aimed to better understand my own history with them so I could create an alternative from within that history.

The OSR seemed like a much better place to work from than any story game lineage. Seemed being the operative word. The more I tried to re-articulate my childhood relationship with games, the more I was reminded how limited they were for me as a child and as an adult. They were forms of compromise, one of many I made from childhood on to navigate a world I felt poorly suited for.

(And when I say "poorly suited," I should be specific here. The confluence of being trans, lesbian, autistic, intellectually critical, and in spiritual relationship with the world beyond the human social milieu made it difficult to find a social horizon in which I could share enough in common to enter into deeper connections with people and social groups. Heck, for so long, I didn't even have the right concepts to articulate this.)

Terms of My Art

As I tried to turn the tools of the OSR toward my own ends, I found myself increasingly at odds with myself. Finally, I accepted that I needed to upend the principles that defined OSR play. I needed to abandon "play" itself as the defining feature of what I was after and give voice to the values that the OSR impinged upon.

For my future reference, I am going to list some of those values while the friction of my relationship to the OSR still lingers, casting them in higher relief.

Attend to bodily vulnerability with loving attention and respect for the interiority and depth of individuals. Mortality and disability illuminate our relationship to the world and ourselves; don't treat death and disability as simple consequences of failure. Respect grief. Linger in the aftermath of violence rather than the mechanical representation of its execution.

Dwell in the entanglements of the lived-in world. Spend time amidst the traces of living gathered in a small room that make a home against the dissolution of consumption. Find the cracks where it lets in the city and its ecology. Follow trails into the wild open of forests, prairies, valleys away from the city and don't be afraid to consider the rending of them by extraction. Break away from the cartography of colony and property to find the way places feel to those moving through them.

Create worlds that invite curiosity, care, and anxious concern toward them and in which characters make their way by adaptation, compromise, community, alienation, and refusal. Without ignoring individual capacity, center mutual responsiveness to undermine clear distinctions between explorer and explored, problem solver and problem.

Use fantasy to magnify and reveal the emotional and ecological connections between elements of the world. If you want a giant bee, embrace the alien world of a giant hive that accompanies it. Let objects, people, and places swell in importance when player interest attaches itself to them; highlight the lines of them with melodrama and then follow the emotion through more constrained drama and surreal juxtaposition.

Orient yourself in the world as a reader when you are not playing the game, and explore the world as a player and character through conversation during the game. This one is more inchoate than the others; I am thinking my way through it. But the games I am most interested in writing are ones that require both in-game and out-of-game commitment on the part of all the participants, that involves a world novel enough that it requires preparation to enter into. More like a book club and less like a pick-up board game.