I attended OSRCon on January 28th with a friend and we both had a what I can only describe as a surreal but entertaining experience. We arrived a few minutes ahead of the scheduled time to the party room of an apartment and found a single man laying on a couch with a computer. The list of attendees I had seen online had roughly 14 people. While I didn’t expect the place to be booming I figured we wouldn’t be the first to arrive. The mysterious lone man perked up as we entered and greeted each other. His name was Chris and he was the creator of OSRCon. OSRCon stands for The Old School Revival Convention. It’s a biannual RPG meetup meant to highlight and promote RPGs from the ‘wild west’ days of RPGs, specifically 1975 – 1985. We sat and talked with Chris while we waited for others to arrive. Chris told us a bit about previous OSRCons and what inspired him to create the Con in the first place. He told us about Grognardia, a blog that had been run by a man named James Maliszewski from 2008 to 2012. The blog focused on earlier RPG materials including systems, magazines and modules. Since the blog had stopped having new posts in 2012, Chris wanted to keep the spirit of old school gaming going and so he made OSRCon. He admitted that while some of his earlier Cons had a lot more people show up every now and then he’d get a pretty small group.
Two more attendees soon showed up and we all put on nifty little name tags. Not wanting to punish the people that arrived on time Chris decided he’d start his game. He described to us the premise of our current situation. An old friend we used to play RPGs with was having a mid-life crisis causing him to enter a catatonic state. Using a new experimental technology we had entered his mind in order to erase a memory that was causing our dear friend all this trouble. In our friends mind we would have on us all of what we actually had on us in the real world and we were also only capable of what we as real people were capable of. My friend quickly grabbed her purse and unloaded a collection of items on the table. Chris was surprised to find that we apparently had at our disposal an X-Acto knife, a multi tool, two pairs of scissors and dental floss among other things. It was around this time I decided to ask Chris what our dear friend’s name was. He threw it back at us and let us name him. I quickly decided his name should be ‘Chris.’ This added a meta element that would continue throughout the game.
In Chris’ mind we found ourself in a dungeon with a mirror and a whetstone. Somehow we understood that this whetstone had the ability to erase a memory in Chris’ mind; we just had to find it and touch the whetstone to it. The mirror allowed us to see the area which contained the troublesome memory. The memory we could see was represented by an old tin lunch box and was apparently guarded by a giant frog. After a bit of exploration we came to the realization we were in an old RPG module called ‘Tomb of Horrors.’ Somehow Chris’ mind had conjured this space for us to navigate. While none of us had explicitly played this module, we all knew that it was known for being described as a death trap. We cautiously explored the dungeon and promptly two of us died. This lead to a new discovery about the nature of Chris’ mind. If we died we’d respawn back in our starting location, similar to a video game character having to restart a level. We experimented with a few different routes, dying several times, but gradually learned more about the space. Eventually we started to get rather creative. We started asking Chris if, having our phones on us meant we could use them. He told us that indeed we could. Quickly we began googling maps of the Tomb of Horrors and the game became a very odd puzzle. With our googling skills and some creative problem solving we ultimately found a way to bring the whetstone and lunch box together and bring peace to Chris’ mind. However, our efforts would come with a price. We inadvertently awakened the demilich Acererak causing us all to suffer serious brain damage. Our friend Chris awoke to find us all out of our minds. Chris revealed his true nature and having been cured of his ailment, promptly and without remorse left us comatose and skipped town.
I think what I liked about this game was how unusual our circumstances were. Death was not scary to us anymore and respawning turned into a mechanic for us to utilize. We had to get very creative with our navigation of the tomb. It was also a very open and free form game. It didn’t feel like we were playing any specific game system. In the end I think dice were only used to determine outcomes about four times. Besides that Chris was just using the description of The Tomb of Horrors from the recent 5E release Tales from the Yawning Portal, and common sense to determine the outcome of each predicament.
During our first game another attendee had arrived, James Maliszewski, the aforementioned creator of the blog Grognardia. He joined us for our second game which was run by a well prepared GM named Zack. In the beginnings of Chris’ game Zack had been setting a table with a battle grid, minis a GM screen and some detailed character sheets. We had a quick lunch and picked out characters. I initially had my eyes on the barbarian. When that sheet was taken by James I turned my attention to the magic user. The game we were playing was called Low Fantasy Gaming. The system was based on D&D and inspired by sword and sorcery fiction such as Conan the Barbarian. My character sheet depicted a beautiful sorceress. I decided she would be named Valushka and practised the worst pseudo-Russian accent I could muster. When we started playing our objective was clear and immediate: serpent men had captured a respected merchant and were dragging her off in the jungle. We were close on their trail and followed them up to a giant ancient spire temple. After a few skirmishes with the serpent men we rescued the merchant woman Kala. My character then realized where we were and the GM told me I knew of an ancient warlock named Abartu who possessed a tome called The Book of Bound Flesh, a powerful magical grimoire of the dead. I knew that the book was in the spire somewhere. My character became excited and convinced the rest of the characters that we must find this book so that we might learn its power. We made our way through the dungeon, dodging deadly traps and slaying monsters. When the book was found Kala turned on us and revealed herself to be the leader of the serpent men. She morphed into a half snake monstrosity and we were forced to kill her and her minions. By the end my character was able to tap into the power of the book and became partially possessed by the spirit of the warlock Abartu, thereby making her magic much more potent. I was very happy with this outcome.
I really enjoyed the classic dungeon crawl qualities of this game. We were a group of adventurers raiding a dungeon to find a powerful artifact just because. The system also called for creativity in combat, where you could ask to try and perform some sort of extra feat when damaging an enemy. A simple roll would determine your success and the GM would give you an outcome. It definitely spiced up combat. The GM was also very receptive to rules bending suggestions, which I liked.
Overall this was a surprising experience. While I thought I would have enjoyed seeing a ton of people in one room playing RPGs I’m actually really glad only about 7 people showed up in total. We each shared many of our thoughts and experiences with RPGs very intimately and got along very well despite many of us not really knowing each other. Both games were great fun in very different ways. I’ll definitely try to attend this Con again when it comes around.
dandy games 