The Old School Renaissance (OSR) has gained traction over the last decade or so, producing contemporary rpg rulesets which are rewrites, reinterpretations or reimplementations of early roleplaying games, typically ‘Original’ Dungeons and Dragons. This ‘Old School’ sensibility has also increasingly shaped more culturally-mainstream and commercial products - Goodman Games’ Dungeon Crawl Classics rpg being one example. Another key element of OSR stuff is that it often seeks, thematically, to offer a reconstructed view of the literary roots of modern fantasy rpgs - one in which Tolkien’s Middle Earth (or some variant thereof) is not treated as the default exemplar of a fantasy setting. OSR products instead turn to the ‘weirder’ roots of fantasy literature by way of the more cynical, morally-ambivalent exoticisms of Howard, Smith and Lovecraft, as well as Leiber, Vance, and Moorcock (to name but a few)
It is unsurprising, then, that in name checking some of the writers who were central to the early construction of the Cthulhu mythos that OSR creators have not only overtly used the mythos in their games, but have also attempted to use something akin to the Original D&D rules as the basis for investigative games set in Lovecaft’s fictional New England. Whilst Eldritch Tales is not the first of these, but it is the most recent and perhaps the most thorough and intriguing attempt to reconfigure the Call of Cthulhu rpg to OSR mechanics. I have only had the opportunity to go through Eldritch Tales briefly, but not only does it sport solid production values and lovely interior illustrations (despite a couple of uneccessarily oversexualised portrayals of women), it looks like a rather innovative adaption of OSR mechanics to the kind of narrative play for which gaming in the worlds of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos is perhaps best-suited. As such we at Ghooric Zone central endorse Eldritch Tales. You can purchase a copy here.
No comments:
Post a Comment