They need to be making real choices about where to go and what to do, with real consequences. They need to know what they're dealing with, or have the fact that they don't know be part of the tactical situation they confront.

For an OSR style game to be fun, the players need to be making tactically meaningful choices constantly. They want to sit down and start playing a game without having to do too much thinking.Īnother challenge is framing meaningful player choice. Since they don't view themselves as creating a narrative around their character, they also don't want to read thinly veiled fan-fiction, or massive setting documents. They want the story to accumulate moving forward, and they don't want to be doing homework. They prefer it to come out, over time in bits and bobs, as it's relevant, and fun. Players in OSR games are often not investing their characters, initially, with a lot of backstory or thought. One challenge comes from the mental perspective that goes along with emergent storytelling. There are real challenges to putting these two things together. I want to talk about how you engage in high concept world building while also running a game that is focused on hex crawling, GP for XP dungeon trawling, and faction play, all with total freedom of player choice, and emergent story telling. What I want to talk about is how to do this with a crazy, over-the-top, snowflake of a setting.

For the purposes of this post, I'm going to assume that you already know how to run an open game like this.

OSR types regularly sing the praises of a style of gaming where narrative emerges as a kind of byproduct of the choices people make and the chaos of chance. Old school blogs are full of excellent advice about how to run a game in an open world, with sandbox style play, and jostling factions.

Old school game dragon behind doors