I’ve got Old-School on my mind

During the last months I’ve been throwing a couple of ideas around what I could run next. At the moment I still have a XCOM-inspired game and a Fallout game to finish. Both are run using Fudge and worked quite well.

For a small local convention I planned to run a game of Barebones Fantasy but then I decided to discard this idea in favor of Lamentations of the Flame Princess? Why? It’s not because I generally prefer LotFP over BBF. I just noticed that no one offered an old-school D&D game at this day. And I just got the awesome hardcover version of LotFP’s Rules and Magic book. Then I remembered that my copy of the LotFP Boxed Set contained a copy of the adventure “Tower of the Stargazer”. So it was settled. The Stargazer runs “Tower of the Stargazer” at the local con. Zwinkerndes Smiley

In general I have a soft spot for old-school gaming. Usually old-school games are rules-light, rulings are more important than rules and the players are challenged as well as the characters. This might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I like it that way. But I am definitely not as hardcore as some others. But still old-school games have a certain appeal to me.

I initially planned to run a Stars Without Number campaign when I was finished with the XCOM game but then my players threw me a screwball by mentioning that they would love to run Shadowrun. So I started researching Shadowrun, buying the latest edition (just to find out I hate it), and shelved the plans for that SWN game. But over time I noticed that I actually avoided working on that SR game in favor of reading old-school material. Aside from rereading LotFP, I bought the Traveller Bundle of Holding and started leafing through the various books which rekindled some of the ideas I had for that SWN game. I even considered using SWN to run a Traveller campaign (which actually sounds like a perfect match).

Lamentations of the Flame Princess on the other hand could be the perfect rule set for a dark and somewhat twisted game set into the early modern age. A sandbox campaign in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War comes to mind. Sometimes I think my subconciousness is actively fighting my attempt to prepare a Shadowrun game and tries to coerce me into running something more old-school and D&D-ish. The question remains whether I should give in to this coercing. At the moment I’m still torn… Ah, what the heck, I’ll ask my players if we can postpone the Shadowrun game to a later year. Smiley