I can trace a lot of my hobbies along crooked paths back to a fuzzy origin, a ball of time and memory that might be as narrow as a year or as wide as a range of years. But it’s rare that I can look at specific interests in the present and say, “That, right there, is where this started.”
This 2012 Gnome Stew blog post by the inimitable Troy E. Taylor is one of those bright origin points: D&D Burgoo: A Touch of Nostalgia.
I read Troy’s post the day it came out, January 30, 2012. I immediately went down the OSR rabbit hole (here’s a Gnome Stew post I wrote two months later, in March 2012, touching on that experience), which led to other rabbit holes: reexamining games I played as a kid, exploring other old-school systems and philosphies of play, and trying all sorts of stuff. New (old) branches of the hobby have unfolded before me. Old interests have been rekindled. It’s been grand.
Fourteen years after Troy’s post, I’m currently:
- Running a Traveller campaign. It’s Mongoose 2e rather than Classic…but there’s not that much daylight between them.
- Playing in an AD&D 2nd Edition game, hot on the heels of running an AD&D 1st Edition game with the same characters. I love 2e again, and 1e has become one of my all-time favorite RPGs.
- Building a fantasy campaign setting, Godsbarrow, using the old-school principles found in Worlds Without Number. I’ve published one Godsbarrow book so far, The Unlucky Isles [affiliate link].
- Buying GURPS books with an eye to running a campaign. I’m not sure what yet, but Infinite Worlds and Time Travel are high on the list. The last time I played GURPS was probably 30+ years ago.
And since that fateful day in 2012, I’ve also:
- Run an Old School Esssentials game for my daughter, Lark, as her introduction to D&D. That was one of my favorite gaming experiences, full stop.
- Honed my feelings on combat as sport vs. combat as war, a key element of old-school play that fascinates me today.
- Designed Hexmancer, a procedural hex generation system.
- Written wilderness encounter tables for DCC RPG, which were later published in The Gongfarmer’s Almanac – Volume 3, 2018 [affiliate link].
- Inked, and “inked,” a bunch of old-school, precision-edge dice. My home and travel dice bags both have a bunch of these dice in them.
- Written about old-school play here on Yore, like dungeon stocking in B/X D&D vs. Labyrinth Lord and the origins of Classic Traveller.
- Created a megadungeon, Godsbarrow’s Black Furnace, for #dungeon23.
- Read a pile of Appendix N books. I started trying to read them all back in 2012 (there’s that year again!), gave up, and have since started up again.
…And probably more stuff that I’ve forgotten. Look at the many pages of Yore posts in the old school category, and you’ll find all sorts of stuff. And you know when the first post was? 2012, the year Troy got me rolling!
How I game is different than it would have been without Troy’s post. What I play is different. My creative output includes different stuff — heck, I don’t think I would ever have gotten Godsbarrow up and running if I hadn’t gone down this path.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that that single blog post is one of the most influential touchstones in my enjoyment of the RPG hobby.
Thank you, Troy, for sparking so much joy!