So last month I made a blog post about Introducing OSR to 5E players. After I had released the post to the wilds of message boards and social media, I received a ton of very good feedback. Thank you. Some of the additional games that were suggested included Dungeon Crawl Classics, Beyond the Wall, Worlds Without Number and others. There are a few other games that I may have to check out just to read the rules.
As you can see from the photo above, I elected to go with the Basic Fantasy Role-Playing Game. I had the books in my possession, I really liked what I was reading. I had the option to allow certain supplements if I wanted (I’m going to allow cantrips and other add-ons) and the players could easily get a PDF of the rules from the Basic Fantasy RPG website.
Just as there were several suggestions for the rule-set, there were also several suggestions for which adventure to run. I was pouring through my library (both dead tree and PDF) to see which one stood out to me the most. In the end, I was lead by inspiration. I just happened to be looking at one of the many online freebie maps (I won’t say which one just yet just in case one of the victims… err… players might be reading this blog post.) and a lightbulb went off when I opened up one. One thing lead to another and I ended up with a little adventure in my head. I pulled out my OneNote and started writing things down. Since this only a one-shot adventure, I made it flexible with a clear goal in mind. Kind of like the type of adventure you could end up in if you went to a gaming convention.
I’m going to hold an online session zero next week. There I’m planning to set some expectations for the game. Allow the players to roll up their characters (which may be the first case of culture shock for them) and introduce myself to them. We have an in-person date set for when we will get together to actually roll some dice.
Thanks again for all of the suggestions and feedback. I plan to have a follow up post to let everyone know how it goes.