Yep, plenty of room for disagreement, but nevertheless, well said Havard (might make a good blog post) Regarding "ages" I can only echo Mathews reply on Grognardia.

Your view of the DA series could be right of course but for me its seems too radicaly different in tone and substance from the Blackmoor of FCC to see it as being what Arneson had in mind. Anyway, I would merely point out that Dave Arneson was a remarkably good natured and collegial fellow who considered gaming to be a group project. He posted on ODD74 that basically everything published should be considered canon whether he had much input to it or not, so its no surprise the zgg line builds on that.

Yeah, it's worth noting that Mr Arneson apparently put way less thought into "canon" lore than most fans do.

As to Mr Arneson's real contribution to the DA series, well, he ran the campaign for 15++ years before the modules appeared. I think it's safe to say, if there was substantial impact on it from other authors, we would have known. Also, that he probably had plenty of notes.

As to the D&D ages, since I think all of us are on the same side here, and since this is ultimately our internet forum, I'll gladly go ahead and bluntly state that I think such a classification is retarded.

All this grognardism has degenerated from commemorating OOP games to windy authors trying to make a buck with demonizing their market rivals.

- No, not at all a slur against you, Aldy, I read your booklet on the FFC,
and it's the first contribution to that "oldschool renaissance" in a long while that was actually a worthwhile read and not just random crap with bad illustrations.

FTR, I tend indeed to divide the "OSR" into two ages:

1.0 - The rulebooks: OSRIC, Basic Fantasy RPG, DaD, the first few adventures.

2.0 - All the other crap that five years ago would have made for a good freebie on Dragonsfoot and Canonfire. Or not even that.






U see what I did there?

Nah, you did very good there. :)

I would also have told you if you had done otherwise. :twisted:

The point is, that so-called OSR was, as a principle, a good idea.
However, a lot of people seem to think that name recognition and nostalgia equal quality. Which they don't.

I am pretty annoyed about it actually, because I spent money on stuff that proved to be unimaginative and poorly executed random crap; that people would even bother to publish some of it, is beyond me.

If they had been less "I need to become a published author", and more "I am gonna do something that helps the gaming community", the game would be better off than with random PDF downloads.

I mean, who still runs a blog like Havard, for example? - Just the stuff he has put out would have made for TEN sourcebooks.

[end/rant, and close of getting carried away.] :twisted: