Istus Take the Wheel - Who I am, and thoughts on the OSR

I'm an aspiring wanderer of wildernesses that have never been.

I'm a dreamer who doesn't get very much done, at the end of the day.

I'm a nervous wreck of a carelord.

I'm an unbelievable, insufferable, absolute fucking nerd.

Don't believe me? Check out this essay I wrote about my history with RPGs, due to appear in Knock Issue #2 (still mid-KS until the 24th) - the Knock version has the bonus of fantastic art by the talented Evlyn Moreau and the incredible layout madness that the Mushmen are known for.

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Istus is the goddess of fate and destiny in good old Gary’s Greyhawk campaign setting. She spins the tapestry of the universe from strands of potentiality. She bears the weight of penning the future, down to the most minute detail. She is all-seeing and all-knowing. And I used to think I was her.

From the beginning of my RPG obsession, my experience GMing (as a preteen roping my too-young brothers and my tolerant mom into a stumbling, fumbling dungeon delve with my brand new 3rd edition Player’s Handbook) was one of hesitance, confusion, and panic. I’d been poring over supplements from the 2nd edition since elementary school, marveling at the realities hidden in the words on the page, fantasizing about making a world come to life for others as vividly and dynamically as it manifested in my head.  I wanted to, needed to, more than anything, but it didn’t seem possible. It seemed overwhelming. I felt anxiety burrow into my brain when I imagined the attempt. 

What about when I didn’t know what to say? 

What about when I made a mistake? 

The illusion would be shattered. The world would be gone. I hesitated for years, but when I got my hands on that PHB I decided it was time. If I tried hard enough, if I held on tight enough to my vision, I could do it. 

(I couldn’t).

As I grew up, I came back to GMing again and again. I would feel that deep yearning in my gut to bring a world to life, to let others step into a living universe outside of their own. There was a path to that place. I could see it, ephemeral and fleeting maybe, but the path was there, just as the other world was. I would work myself up, I would manically and directionlessly assemble people and places and events and gods, I would hold on tighter and tighter to my creations when they met the cold reality of player contact. Then I would collapse under the morass of stress and disappointed expectations, and would eventually fold the campaigns altogether. 

I’d abandon RPGs for a year or two, and then the urge would reawaken and I’d find my way back for another doomed attempt.

This process continued into my adulthood. It continued until last year, in fact, when I came to the end of the longest campaign I’d ever run, the first one I’d ever brought to a graceful(ish) conclusion. This was The Campaign. The one that I’d put thousands of hours of prep into, carefully crafting a narrative the way the prevailing wisdom of a post-Critical Role and Adventure Zone world told me I was supposed to. The one that had won me incredible joy and wonderful friends and, if you can believe it, my future husband. The one that had sent me into countless panic attacks and spiraling depression and anxiety. We came to the end and I decided I couldn’t do it like this anymore. There had to be another way. 

So I finally looked into this weird, wacky, wonderful OSR thing I’d been hearing about for years.

The thing that immediately struck me about old school play was that it seemed so freeing to the GM. A referee, not a storyteller. Or maybe a storyteller, but not an author. You’re relating the sublime and bizarre tales you’ve heard of a place far away, as real as ours. You’re not penning a beginning, middle, and end. You are the honest, neutral mechanism through which the players view something glorious. You’re the conduit.

It felt like I could breathe again when I thought about running a game this way. I felt such relief. I felt like I could finally see the ephemeral path to the other world I’d glimpsed over and over again as a kid. The one I thought I was building for my players and I for the last few years, but that had ultimately eluded me. It took me a long time to articulate what about the OSR opened that path up to me again, but I knew it had to do with losing control. With letting go.

There’s a discussion to be had about the greater control old school play confers on the GM in the “Rulings, not Rules” sense. There’s GM fiat aplenty in this corner of the RPG world, but that’s not the kind of control I’m talking about.

I’m talking about letting go of narrative control. Of having to decide ahead of time what’s going to happen. What they’re going to see. What the world will offer up to them. Relying on random encounters, and random tables, and reaction rolls, and and and... it frees you of the responsibility to craft what should happen, and instead lets you dedicate all of your mental cycles to fill in the gaps of what is happening.

Because, like in the real world, nothing should happen. Stuff just happens. This is what I missed when I was a kid, all the way through to a stressed, lost 30 -year old trying to make my dearest friends happy with the game we cared so much about. The way to create that feeling, that elusive, transcendent sensation of touching a real world beyond ours, is to make it like ours. Make it real. Make it random. Make it just a little bit senseless and unpredictable and miraculous and, yes, cruel, because there is magic to be found in that.

Powered by the Apocalypse games have some variant of “hold on lightly” in their stated principles. Apocalypse World says to “Sometimes, disclaim decision making.” There’s a whole realm of debate on how much PbtA and OSR relate to one another, and whether they have anything to learn from each other, but I think this is one place where they definitely overlap. Hold on lightly. Play to find out what happens. I’m not going to argue about which framing is better - I have deep love for both schools. But I do know how it finally clicked for me. When I read thousands of words on the PbtA style of gamerunning I glimpsed the light but I never comprehended it, not completely. When I found my way to the OSR, first read the Principia Apocrypha's advice to “Divest yourself of their fate,” I fucking got it.

There is joy in letting go. There is dizzy ecstasy in watching things you and your friends have created and care deeply for going careening in strange and unexpected directions. There is an unbelievable pleasure in being both creator and audience all at once. And without letting yourself be surprised you will never get to experience that pleasure. You will close off the path.

GMing is a huge responsibility. You are the facilitator of everyone’s fun. You are responsible for creating a verisimilar world, and engaging challenges, and the range of things that could potentially happen. What you’re not responsible for, what you can’t be responsible for, is deciding what does happen. Because you’re just a person. Or, no: you are the conduit. The lens through which the other world reveals itself to you and everyone else at the table. 

Deciding the fate of worlds isn’t your job. That’s on Istus.

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Man, that was a sick stinger, huh? Well, I'm going to ruin it by adding an addendum.

I identify partially with the OSR ethos. I am passionate about the unmatched creativity and DIY spirit that people in that corner of the RPG world show. Some of the coolest and best and nicest people in RPGs work out of that space. There are also bad actors, and people I would prefer not to associate with, especially given that I'm a queer man with strong political tendencies and little tolerance for intolerance. 

I also have a passion for PbtA, for story games, for collaborative world building and anti-canon. I deeply love emergent fiction, but also that bugbear storytelling in general. Things that a lot of people (not me) believe are antithetical to the OSR style.

This seems pretty navel-gazey to me as a first post, so if you're still here thanks for staying with me. It's just that since I had a bit of a wakeup call regarding the worst people in this hobby, I've been thinking about where I want to fit in it as a newbie writer with ambitions to Make Things. I'm not ready to give up on self-identified OSR folks because I know a lot of them are great. I'm just not sure I'm one of them. So I just want to plant my flag here for the odd person who comes by and wants to know what to expect out of this blog. The cares of a carelord. Call them your Glass Boy Guarantees (TM):

• I care about worlds that feel real to those playing in them - player or GM or spectator, story game or old school sandbox. I want to lose myself in wild places dreamed up by my friends and I. I want to experience, a few hours at a time, that other, tangible world.
• I care about stories that grow out of small seeds scattered to the winds. I want to play to find out what happens. I want to divest myself of my players' fates. I want to let our worlds fly off of the tracks, and I want the (fictional) people I care about to live or die on the whim of a die roll or an errant flicker of inspiration. I want the choices my players make to matter, in and out of the worlds we create.
• I care about showing my work, in every sense. I've spent a lot of time reading RPG blogs and I found them rife with disturbingly complete content and appallingly polished thoughts. Disgusting. In all seriousness though, for me it's so valuable to see how the sausage is made, and that tends to be my favorite content from other people so I'd like to do a lot of that myself. Yes, there's going to be things that are complete and functional when I post them, but also expect a lot of stream of consciousness dev logs, step-by-step content creation, and so on.
• I care about welcoming everyone who welcomes others. I refuse to countenance blind hatred and exterminationist rhetoric. I don't want to play with, work with, or associate with people who harbor beliefs that marginalize or discriminate.

So anyways, that's what you're in for. On to the silly swordgames, friends. The chevaliers and curses, the hills beyond our home, the green and verdant wood with boundless space and time to roam.