Story Isn't the Enemy

Among the many shibboleths of the Old School Renaissance, few are as enduring as the rejection of "story," "plot," and "narrative" in roleplaying games. These terms are often treated like contaminants, indicators that something has gone awry in a campaign or adventure. Speak of "story" without the usual ritual denunciations and you're liable to be accused of abandoning the principles of old school play.

I understand where this aversion comes from. Since the earliest days of this blog, I've often shared it. At the same time, I don't believe stories have no place in roleplaying games. However, like many others, my earliest experience as a roleplayer were from a time when attempts to inject "story," – by which I mean a deliberate, authorial structure of rising and falling action, dramatic turning points, and satisfying resolutions – were usually ham-fisted at best and outright railroads at worst.

There’s a reason why one of Grognardia’s most widely read (and most frequently argued about) posts is “How Dragonlance Ruined Everything.” The post touched a nerve because it spoke to something many of us experienced firsthand: modules and campaigns that confused narrative structure with narrative control. These were adventures where the outcomes were preordained, its dramatic beats carefully plotted, and the players expected to play along rather than play through. The referee, in such cases, became less an impartial adjudicator and more a frustrated novelist trying to drag the player characters through a plot that offered very little in the way of choice. Unsurprisingly, this left a bad taste in the mouths of those who cherished the open-ended freedom of the early days.

But here’s the thing: an emergent story is still story.

Take my House of Worms campaign for Empire of the Petal Throne. More than a decade of weekly play has produced a very detailed chronicle of events, consisting of actions taken, choices made, consequences endured, victories won, and, occasionally, defeats suffered. None of this was plotted out in advance. Most of it arose organically, through the interaction of player decisions, random tables, misread intentions, and lucky – or bad – rolls. Yet, looking back, I can trace arcs and patterns. I can recount the rise and fall of rivalries and the strange twists of fate that brought certain aspects of the campaign to greater prominence while others dropped away. I can talk about betrayals and reconciliations, discoveries and reversals. That’s a story. It may not be a tidy one. It may not resolve neatly – but it's a story nonetheless.

Too often, I think certain strands of OSR thought fails to acknowledge this and I don't exclude myself from this criticism. In rejecting plotted stories, we too quickly rejected the very idea of story itself. However, stories don’t have to be plotted. They don’t have to follow the Hero’s Journey. They don’t even need to have a central protagonist. They can simply emerge from play, from the piling up of decisions and consequences, the unpredictable results of dice rolls, and the slow evolution of characters over time. This is, in my view, one of the greatest strengths of the hobby.

Likewise, many classic modules – yes, even old school ones – contain what we might call a plot, even if it's implicit or only lightly sketched. A fortress inhabited by giants who've been raiding civilized lands is not just a list of rooms and monsters. It's a framework for conflict, danger, and mystery. It implies certain questions and challenges: Who are these giants? What do they want? Why are they raiding the lands of Men? These questions don’t force a narrative, but they do provide the raw material out of which one might grow. A good adventure isn’t inert; it suggests motion and consequence, even if it doesn’t prescribe them.

That’s where I think the OSR’s kneejerk hostility to “story” often goes astray. It’s an understandable overreaction, but an overreaction nonetheless. It’s shaped by the bad experiences of railroads, boxed text, and scripted scenes. However, in pushing back against those things, we risk throwing out something valuable. If we mistake any form of narrative structure for narrative imposition, we blind ourselves to one of the most powerful and rewarding aspects of roleplaying: the ability to discover a story in play, rather than impose one from above.

The truth is that most open-ended, player-driven campaigns do produce stories. Often, they’re some of the most compelling stories in gaming, precisely because no one saw them coming. They're not crafted to deliver a message or to hit emotional beats on cue. They arise naturally, shaped by the decisions of players and the impartial logic of dice. We should be able to recognize that without fear. Story isn’t the enemy; control is. Let the dice decide, let the players choose and the story will take care of itself.

Dungeons & Dreamscapes

I’ve often said I feel fortunate to have discovered Dungeons & Dragons when I did, before the dead hand of brandification settled over the game and drained it of the wild, untamed esthetic that once made it so visually compelling and culturally strange. In the years before D&D became a polished entertainment “property,” its visual identity was a chaotic collage of influences drawn from unexpected sources: psychedelic counterculture, turn-of-the-century Art Nouveau, underground comix, pulp magazines, and outsider art. Monsters leered with extra eyes and boneless limbs, while dungeons sprawled like fever dreams. There was a visual lawlessness to early D&D (and to roleplaying games more broadly) that mirrored the creative freedom of its rules. That freedom invited players to imagine fantasy worlds that were not simply adventurous, but also surreal, grotesque, and deeply personal.

These thoughts came back to me recently while flipping through some of the Dungeons & Dragons materials I encountered shortly after I took my first tentative steps into the hobby. Looking at them now, decades later, I’m struck not just by their content, but also by their form. Much of the art did not resemble anything I had seen before. It was crude at times, even amateurish by the standards of commercial illustration. Yet, it was also evocative in a way that transcended technique. These images did not so much depict a fantasy world as suggest one, obliquely, symbolically, even irrationally. Many felt like fragments from dreams or relics from some lost visionary tradition and, on some level, they were.

That tradition was a subterranean one, largely outside the orbit of mainstream fantasy art. Psychedelic poster designers, Symbolist painters, and zinesters working on the margins of the counterculture all contributed, consciously or not, to the strange visual DNA of early roleplaying games. Before branding demanded consistency and legibility, Dungeons & Dragons was porous enough to absorb all of it. The result was an esthetic that was both wildly eclectic and, paradoxically, cohesive in its weirdness. It didn’t feel like a mainstream product; it felt like artifacts from another world.

Today, it’s common to point to Tolkien as the primary visual and thematic influence on early D&D. His mark is real and unmistakable (despite what Gary Gygax wanted us to believe). However, when you examine the actual artwork that filled TSR’s products in the late 1970s and early ’80s – the era when I entered the hobby – you find yourself far from Middle-earth. Instead of noble elves and stoic rangers, you see grotesque creatures, warped anatomy, anatomical impossibilities, and alien geometries rendered in flat inks and, later, garish colors. This wasn’t the Shire. This was something older, more primal, and far stranger.

Where did this esthetic come from?

As I’ve already suggested, part of the answer lies in the psychedelic explosion of the 1960s. This was a cultural moment that sought to dissolve the boundaries between consciousness and art. Psychedelic artists like Rick Griffin and Victor Moscoso developed a visual language rooted in abstraction, distortion, and saturated color, a kind of sensory mysticism meant to evoke altered states. Concert posters and album covers became portals to other dimensions. Meanwhile, underground comix, like those of Robert Crumb or Vaughn Bodē, combined sex, satire, fantasy, and absurdism into worlds that gleefully rejected the conventions of good taste or coherent storytelling.

While Gygax and Arneson were not themselves products of this milieu, the audience they attracted often was – college students, sci-fi fans, and other oddballs shaped by the psychedelic visual environment of the late ’60s and early ’70s. I was younger than that cohort, a child in fact, not a teen or adult, but even I absorbed some of its esthetic currents. They filtered into my world through album covers, comics, cartoons, toys, and the hazy, low-fi look of the decade itself. I didn’t yet know what most of these things meant, but I nevertheless felt their strangeness. They stuck with me, shaping my imagination in ways I only later came to understand.

TSR, for its part, didn’t initially reflect these influences. Much of the earliest D&D art was traditional or utilitarian, inherited from the wargaming scene. As the game’s popularity exploded in 1979, TSR began to draw on a new crop of young illustrators, many of them influenced, directly or indirectly, by underground comix, countercultural poster art, and the lingering weirdness of the 1970s. Their work didn’t smooth out the chaos from which early D&D was born – it amplified it.

No one embodied this more than Erol Otus. His illustrations for the Basic and Expert boxed sets are among the most iconic in the history of the hobby, as well as some of the strangest. Otus’s monsters don’t just look dangerous; they look wrong, like something glimpsed in a fever or half-remembered from a dream. His color palettes are lurid, his anatomy grotesquely playful, his compositions uncanny and theatrical. His esthetic doesn’t belong to heroic fantasy. It belongs to a blacklight poster, hung next to a velvet mushroom print and a battered copy of The Teachings of Don Juan.

Otus, whether intentionally or not, brought the visual grammar of psychedelia into the core of D&D. In doing so, he captured something essential about the game: that it wasn’t just a fantastic medieval wargame; it was a tool for exploring the irrational, the liminal, the transformed. Other artists took up different parts of this same sensibility. Dave Trampier’s work, for example, especially his iconic AD&D Players Handbook cover, radiates a stillness and mystery more akin to myth or ritual than heroic adventure. Other similarly restrained pieces of early D&D likewise seem caught between worlds.

The same spirit is evident in third-party publications. Judges Guild modules are packed with crude, surreal illustrations that throb with symbolic weirdness. David Hargrave’s Arduin Grimoire goes even further. It's a deranged collage of cybernetic demons, magical diagrams, flying sharks, and bizarre maps that reads like D&D filtered through Zardoz. It’s no coincidence that Hargrave gave Otus his first professional credit. They were kindred spirits, working not within a genre, but along the outermost fringes of it.

Beyond psychedelia, another artistic thread ran through the background: the ornate, esoteric elegance of Art Nouveau. The flowing lines of Aubrey Beardsley, the sacred geometry of Alphonse Mucha, and the decadent mysticism of Gustav Klimt all haunt the margins of early RPG art. Beardsley’s illustrations for Salome or Le Morte d’Arthur look, at times, like direct ancestors to early D&D's depictions of witches, sorcerers, and demons. These fin de siècle influences were rediscovered during the 1960s counterculture and found their way, through posters, tarot decks, and zines, into the strange visual stew of early roleplaying games.

Even the dungeon itself is shaped by this visionary impulse. Early dungeons aren’t realistic structures. They’re mythic underworlds. They don’t obey architectural logic but symbolic logic, filled with teleporters, talking statues, secret doors, and fountains of infinite snakes. They’re not places so much as thresholds. To descend into a dungeon is to cross into a space where transformation of one kind or another is not only possible but expected.

That’s why so many early modules have such power decades later. Quasqueton, Castle Amber, White Plume Mountain, The Ghost Tower of Inverness – they’re not just combat arenas. They’re almost spiritual landscapes, mythic spaces presented as keyed maps. The artwork used to depict them conjures a mood, a worldview, a sense of mystery, inviting players to see fantasy not as genre convention, but almost as a moment of altered perception.

However, as D&D became a brand, this strangeness was steadily scrubbed away. Style guides were introduced. Idiosyncratic artists gave way to professionals. The game’s visuals became cleaner, more representational, more standardized. With that polish came a flattening of the imagination. D&D no longer looked like a vision; it looked like product.

This, I think, is what so many of us in the early days of the Old School Renaissance were reaching for, even if we couldn’t name it at the time. We were looking for the weirdness again, for the ecstatic, chaotic, sometimes unsettling energy that marked those early years. We remembered when fantasy didn’t have to be safe or heroic or respectable. We remembered when D&D looked like a door to Somewhere Else.

That's because fantasy, properly understood, is not an esthetic. It is a vision of the world tilted just enough to let the impossible shine through. Like the pioneers of science fiction and fantasy, the early artists of Dungeons & Dragons understood this. Otus understood it. Trampier understood it. So did Beardsley, Griffin, and countless anonymous illustrators working on mimeographed zines and early rulebooks in the 1970s. They weren’t just drawing monsters or dungeons. They weren’t just illustrating rules. They were revealing other worlds.

Fountainhead

While it's still possible to argue in good conscience about the precise origins or start date of the Old School Renaissance, I don't think there can be any serious debate that the major intellectual impetus behind the early OSR was the reexamination of original (1974) Dungeons & Dragons. That's certainly how I first became aware of the growing network of forums and blogs that formed the nucleus of one the most imaginatively dynamic movements within the hobby in some time. 

Of particular importance in this regard is Finarvyn's OD&D Discussion forum, better known simply as ODD74. At the suggestion of Philotomy Jurament (of "Philotomy's OD&D Musings" fame), whom I met through the Troll Lord Games forums, I registered at ODD74 in early December 2007 and began my own personal journey into reexamining OD&D.

Or perhaps I should say examining OD&D, because, while I had owned copies of the Little Brown Books and supplements since the mid-1980s, I'd never really read them carefully, let alone used them at the table. They were, at best, historical curiosities that had value as collector's items and little else. To my way of thinking at the time, OD&D had long ago been superseded by several later editions of the game, most notably Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, which I held in especially high esteem. Through my interactions with the many knowledgeable and thoughtful gamers who posted at ODD74, I began to see just who wrong I was in thinking this way.

Among the many lessons I learned over the course of the next several months, during which I read and posted to the forum with obsessive regularity, the first was this: old ≠ bad. That might seem like a small thing or even an obvious thing, but, sad to say, it wasn't, at least to me. I'd fallen prey to the consumerist myth that newer is better, buttressed, no doubt, by the desire of RPG companies to sell me new editions of games I already owned and enjoyed. That's why I'd dutifully bought both the second edition of AD&D in 1989 and Third Edition (of what?) in 2000 (not to mention v.3.5 just three short years later). I wanted to stay up-to-date in my gaming and the only way to do that was to buy more stuff.

OD&D, even in its purest form – the three LBBs and nothing more – is a perfectly playable game. Certainly, it requires a goodly amount of interpretation by any would-be referee, but that's not the same thing as saying, as some do, that OD&D is incomplete, never mind unplayable. It's definitely not a "modern" RPG, lacking as it does definitions, explanations, and even occasionally consistency between its various sections. Instead, it's a glorious, extravagant mess, a veritable Pandora's box whose chaotic contents literally changed entertainment forever. There's an almost palpable power in those three slim, staple-bound booklets if you're willing to cast aside, if only briefly, the subsequent history of roleplaying. After all, this is where it all began.

I had initially come to study OD&D because I'd become dissatisfied with the direction of Dungeons & Dragons under the stewardship of Wizards of the Coast. I was driven by the paradoxical notion that the only way forward was backward, which is to say, that I felt D&D had become so changed that the only way I could conceive of fixing it was to try and turn the clock back, all the way to the very beginning. Anything less than that would be a half-measure, doomed to repeat the very same mistakes that had led Dungeons & Dragons to where it was in 2007 – overcomplicated and deracinated.

The second lesson I learned from examining OD&D was this: it contains multitudes. The same qualities that had led Gary Gygax famously to declare his first creation to be "a non-game" – its open-endedness, flexibility, and variability – were precisely those that I now found so appealing. Indeed, I saw in them an antidote to my dissatisfaction with the direction of contemporary D&D. What's more is that, as I interacted with others on the ODD74 forums (and, in time, OSR blogs), I discovered that, by design, OD&D could be played in a variety of different ways. The history of the early hobby attested to this and, in fact, proved to be the fertile seedbed out of which so many later roleplaying games would flower. 

I can't stress enough how emancipatory this was to me at the time. I'd grown up a TSR fanboy, hanging on the Word of God that descended from the heights of Lake Geneva. This meant that I tried to the best of my ability to play D&D in the "official" manner whenever possible. While this took a lot of the burden of rules interpretation off my shoulders, it also probably curtailed my creativity to some degree, prodding me to play the game in a particular fashion. I have no real complaints about this – I had a lot of fun playing RPGs in my youth, as evidenced by the fact that I still play them in middle age – but I have no doubt that I also closed myself off to other possibilities. Coming to OD&D with an open mind helped me to understand this.

This is why I think, even half a century later, that there is value in reading original Dungeons & Dragons. Indeed, I think there's value in playing OD&D. This the game that started it all, the one that first taught the world what a fantasy roleplaying game was. Much like the details of the early history of the OSR, it's possible for men of good conscience to argue about the merits and flaws of OD&D's design, but I hope we can all recognize just how literally vital the three Little Brown Books are. They presented the world not merely with rules but with a new form of entertainment – one limited only by the collective imaginations of those who participate in it.

How many other books – RPG or otherwise – can honestly make that claim?

Happy New Year

Somehow, another year has come and gone and, while I wouldn't go so far as to say 2023 was a bad year for me, it certainly was a frustrating one, filled with numerous unwelcome distractions that prevented my completing almost any of the projects I hoped I might. Rather than dwell on that, I plan instead to look upon 2024 as filled with possibility, including the possibility that I'll do this year what I was unable to do last year. 

To that end, you'll probably be seeing an increase in posts about the development of Secrets of sha-Arthan. I've been working on it on and off for the last two and a half years. Lots of progress has been made, but there's still a lot more to do. Because this is a passion project without any specific end goal, there's been no real incentive to finish it according to a schedule. Though that's still largely true, I very much do want to see it finished, at least in draft form, before the conclusion of this year (preferably sooner). Posting about it publicly might help me to do that, so I beg your continued indulgence as I do so.

2024 is also the half-century anniversary of the release of original Dungeons & Dragons and I plan to devote quite a bit of commentary to the game that started it all throughout the year. Though I am not presently playing OD&D, I have a particular affection for this edition of D&D, because it's the one that served as my gateway to what would eventually come to be known as the Old School Renaissance, which would, in turn, serve as the impetus to start this blog. Consequently, it's only right that OD&D should once again take center stage here at Grognardia, as I hope it will in the wider world of roleplaying.

Until then, I'd like to wish everyone a happy and fun 2024. Fight on!

Never Far from the OSR

I was away in northern Ontario last week. While there, I was surprised to discover that the main street of the closest small town included a game store. Though the focus of the place was clearly on board and card games, there was nevertheless a decent selection of other offerings, including roleplaying games. Most of the RPGs were the usual suspects – D&D, Pathfinder, etc. – but also present were multiple copies of Lamentations of the Flame Princess, which, along with some Goodman Games Dungeon Crawl Classics material, carried the banner for the OSR. Not bad!

"So OSR That It Died and Came Back"

A couple of weeks ago, Chris McDowall, creator of Into the Odd and Electric Bastionland, had a livestream in which he talked about "TTRPG Blogging and the OSR." In it, he highlights a number of blogs, both old and new, operating within the broad Old School Renaissance sphere. Among those falling into the former category is Grognardia, about which Chris says many very kind things, for which I am grateful. For those who care, I've embedded the video below, starting shortly before he begins to discuss Grognardia. 

That said, the entire video, lasting about an hour, is worth watching, especially if, like me, you're out of the loop about the current state of the OSR blogosphere. I found this very helpful, since I'm no longer as plugged into the Old School scene as I used to be. Much of that is the result of simply falling out of the habit during this blog's hiatus, but some of it is due to a sense, perhaps false, that blogging is no longer as integral to online discussion of RPGs, OSR or otherwise, as it once was. The very fact that I'm discussing a video demonstrates, I think, that the center of gravity has shifted over the last few years toward that medium, leaving blogs and forums, which were once the crucibles of the OSR, lagging behind.

Unless I'm wrong, of course. As I said, I no longer have my finger on the pulse of anything really, including the OSR or its many descendent esthetic movements. It's very possible – likely even – that I am misinterpreting the present situation. From where I'm sitting, though, it seems as if almost everyone has a Youtube channel or a podcast (even I have a podcast, albeit one with a very narrow focus) and that it's on those platforms where the kinds of in-depth analyses and discussions that used to characterize the blogosphere are taking place. That's why I've often considered doing something more seriously with them myself, but the truth is I am probably too old and resistant to change (not mention largely lacking in the technical skills necessary to do this successfully) to make it work, hence my sticking with this blog rather than "upgrading" as others have done.

What are your thoughts on this? Do blogs still have relevance or have they been superseded by videos and podcasts?