Creating Narrative Campaigns in the OSR

Has somebody told you the OSR can't do narrative campaigns? Think again!

Transcript

Good morning. I was looking at Reddit the other day. Someone posted about narrative storytelling in OSR or about running narrative adventures, something in that vein. And there were the usual kind of responses that were bubbling up about OSR and narrative, and those aren't important to me—only to say that, hey, these games are yours. Do what you want with them.

The OSR is confusing because it is both something about the systems—in other words, and what that is I'm not even going to get into because nobody can agree or say for sure what it is—but it's a system thing, and it's also a community of play thing. So people will talk about OSR principles of play that are separate from OSR as a system.

My D&D History

I came up in what I maybe call the second generation of tabletop gamers. I was born in the 70s, but I was too young to play in the 70s. I wasn't aware of the original OD&D, the white box or the three brown books, or the Holmes version until I was well into adulthood. My original version was that Basic/Expert set from 1981 and then mixing in AD&D stuff. I had Monster Manual, I had the Player's Handbook, I had the DMG, and we just kind of munched all that stuff together. I was maybe 8 or 10 years old at the time. We just did goofy kid stuff, playing whatever kind of game we wanted to play. I'm sure some of that, though I have very little recollection of those earliest adventures, was just running around doing stuff.

We were not aware of the kind of mega dungeon, open sandbox-driven games of the '70s in those gaming clubs and groups. But I'm sure we did some of that where we just invented spaces. I remember in school just filling up my graph paper with these crazy dungeon maps. But I think we also played stories because that was our background—things like The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien and other stories. We also wanted to tell those stories. Maybe some folks would say that's not really OSR I'm talking about anymore; it's more old school, where we're talking about the literal play back in the day as opposed to how play has evolved in this looking back at that.

But the same systems—BX or AD&D versus whatever you might be playing now. If you're playing Old School Essentials, that would be based on BX. You might be playing AD&D, or you might be playing OSRIC. It really doesn't matter. These systems are yours, right?

I think one of the things as a child playing in isolation of all these groups was that we could really do what we wanted to do and not have any kind of concern, or really there was no greater community that had any sort of sway in our minds or anyone else's minds in what we were doing. Whereas now, with everything being so connected on the internet, it can feel like all these other groups are kind of telling you, and you may even be looking for someone to tell you how to play, whereas we couldn't.

OSR and Narrative Storytelling

When you talk about narrative storytelling, you might hear folks say about OSR-type games that, "Oh no, no, no. What we do is, you know, we want to concentrate on emergent play or location-based stories or scenarios," or I might call it scenario-based play. But these things aren't really opposites. They're not opposing views. You can use them however you like.

I want to spend the rest of this video talking about how you can use some of these techniques that are established and revered in the OSR space within a narrative framework. So, let's just do that.

I'm going to use The Lord of the Rings as my overarching example because I think it fits in many ways the types of stories that using OSR systems can tell very well. The structure of The Lord of the Rings, in a gaming sense, in a scenario sense, you have an overarching scenario. That scenario has a protagonistic force or at least one side trying to do something, maybe one side trying to prevent something. In The Lord of the Rings case, it's the War of the Ring—Sauron trying to take over Middle Earth and the foes opposing him. So you've got this overarching idea, right? The War of the Ring.

Then within that, you have all these other things that are going on where the party fits into that. They can be anywhere you want. So, we're going to assume that, say, the hobbits are the PCs in this scenario. So, we're saying, okay, we're in the War of the Ring and the hobbits are the PCs.

Location-Based Scenarios in the OSR

In what we call a location-based adventure, there's something happening in a particular location, and then the party can interact with that as they choose. So, you say, "Okay, over here is where the Caves of Chaos are, and the Caves of Chaos is doing stuff that's there. Over this other location, there's this other thing going on. Oh, there's an island over there, Isle of Dread, and stuff is going on over there." Things are kind of tied to locations.

In some campaigns, what they'll do is they'll have all these on the map. What a lot of folks do is they'll take different adventures, different modules like Isle of Dread and Keep on the Borderlands and maybe Horror on the Hill and these early adventures that are location-based—it's in their names, right? The Isle of Dread, some caves, a hill—and they'll sort of plunk them on their map, and then they'll set the rumors out there, and the party will decide, "Oh, that hill sounds kind of interesting," or, "We got a kind of a treasure map, the Isle of Dread. We should maybe figure that out," or, "I heard on the Borderlands there are these caves," and they can go do that stuff.

What I mean by scenario-based is kind of taking that same idea. It doesn't necessarily have to be tied to a location, but there are all these scenarios happening. So, hey, these guys are under threat from this force over here. Okay, that's kind of one scenario. Something's happening over here, that's another scenario. Or maybe some scenario is happening where you are. Yet there's that core idea of the party having the freedom to approach it, accept it, or decline it as they choose.

As we often talk about in sandbox play, just because they might choose not to respond to a thing doesn't mean the thing doesn't exist. In the classic sense, if they don't go to the Isle of Dread, the Isle of Dread kind of sits there. The Caves of Chaos kind of sit there, and they're just there waiting. They're sort of in a status quo. In some ways, you can think of it, if you don't want to get too meta, as being in a holding pattern or out of buffer memory. These places are in a kind of uneasy equilibrium, and then when the party shows up, they flip it one way or another. So everything's kind of balanced.

A good example from a western is the "Man with No Name" movies, particularly "Fistful of Dollars," where he comes to a town and the town is divided by two groups. Those groups are basically evenly matched; they can't really dislodge each other. But then this force comes in, and suddenly both sides recognize that having this extra force is going to tip it one way or another, and that sets things in motion. If you imagine before the Man with No Name shows up, maybe they would have been in that stalemate forever, but then he shows up and it causes imbalance.

You can think about that when you're looking at your locations or your scenarios in terms of what happens if the party doesn't show up. Well, it just kind of stays there. In this narrative sense, you want to tie the scenarios to what's happening in the overarching story or the larger scenario. I should probably think of a better name—I'll call it the campaign scenario.

So you have the campaign scenario, the War of the Ring. Then when you're looking at all these smaller scenarios that might be happening underneath it, they should all tie back. It should almost be like a pyramid, if you will, where you have the campaign scenario at the top and these lines coming down. You have all these other scenarios happening, and everything's trickling down from the campaign scenario. Whatever the party chooses to engage with or not somehow reflects this situation.

If you're in the War of the Ring, which arches over the entirety of Middle Earth, there's nowhere you can go and not be in some way affected by it. That comes through in these different scenarios. Things are happening—the Nine are riding, Frodo and the gang have been given their marching orders. Their initial adventure is just to get to Bree. The book invites you to look at even their side misadventures as being influenced or somehow having to do with the ring, with the War of the Ring. Whether it's providential interaction, whether it's them running into the riders themselves.

You could talk about when they end up going into the Old Forest and getting lost. That's probably just your classic misadventure, though it does lead them to meeting Tom Bombadil and to getting the barrow blades by which they're able to defeat the Witch King later on. Maybe you say, "Oh, they found barrow blades and they're magic. Wouldn't it be cool if that magic affected this thing?" Or it's just, "Hey, the Witch King is a creature that needs to be hit by magic weapons, and they just happen to find a magic weapon." The point is that those scenarios may seem—and maybe they are—not directly pertaining to the narrative arc, but they have significance. They're part of it, or you at least should be thinking about that when you create your scenarios.

If you're working in a narrative space and you have your campaign scenario, when you are creating your hex maps, your hex crawls—the hobbits were, in a sense, hex crawling. They went off-road and they're going through wild country and they end up getting lost and in these spots. You're not just rolling on or generating totally random events or locations to go with it. These events and locations are part and parcel of the world, and the world is part and parcel of your campaign.

Even though, yeah, Tom Bombadil doesn't go fight Sauron, these things have relation to each other. They feel like they're in the same world, and there's some kind of connective tissue thematically or in some other way. Tom Bombadil comes up in the Council of Elrond because they want to know, "Should we just give the ring to Tom and have him sit back there?" They say no—he's an extremely powerful, interesting individual, but in the end he could not hold out, so we can't do that. It's not something that was unknown necessarily; it wasn't like, "Oh my gosh, I ran into this thing because it came from outside, because I rolled on some other wandering creature list and got this strange deed that's sitting there." Suddenly it throws my story in doubt.

You could see how, if Tolkien was running as a game master, it could have gone that way—rolled up a demigod encounter. Well, how does that demigod encounter reflect the rest of this mission, the rest of this campaign which seems to be fighting another demigod? Couldn't we just go to demigod A and have them defeat demigod B? You could do that, and it can be worthwhile, and you can get some nice twists out of that. But ultimately, I think when you are starting from a scenario—not just the world, but the world in some kind of crisis or transition moment that you want the party to be a part of—this should affect everything you have.

So when you're coming up with the Barrows, right? The Barrow creatures—it's not coincidental that the Barrow-wight goes after Frodo in particular. There is something, I think, thematic there. It doesn't have to be explicit. I don't think Tolkien ever makes an explicit connection, but it seems to be clear over the course of Lord of the Rings that these evil things seem to target Frodo more than others. Whether they know it or not, if they're driven by something they don't even know what it is, they kind of seem to go after Frodo. There's a reason for that. We know ultimately that there could be a reason for it, but we don't know what that reason is. These things all connect in some way to the overarching campaign scenario.

So you have these location or scenario adventures. You just fit the tools or shape the tools to fit what you're doing. They get to Rohan, and Rohan's got stuff happening. That would be kind of a location, right? They come to Rohan. Rohan is under sway because of Wormtongue and Saruman's over here. That stuff all pertains to the War of the Ring. But it's also, in a sense, a location—just like Gondor is another location thing with Denethor and the fact that he's becoming more and more under the sway or being driven to despair by Sauron through the palantír. That's going on there.

Emergent Storytelling in the OSR

This leads into the second big thing, the tool that's in your toolbox: emergent storytelling. You run into something that's just a wandering creature, something really random, but that piece of randomness you injected ends up creating story around it.

An example from a campaign I ran over Discord a couple years ago: the party was wandering through the wilderness. I rolled up a random encounter. It was a character—a classed character. It was a wizard. I was thinking about what this wizard was doing all by themselves in the middle of nowhere, so I made a bit of a crackpot. Comes running out of the bushes and has these interactions with the party. Those interactions started a relationship with this character that started as just a guy they met to kind of a forced prisoner, essentially, where they wanted to drag him along with them. On the one hand, it seemed like they were rescuing him, but on the other hand, they were definitely keeping him captive. That person escaped, started talking to people he would meet and kind of poisoned them against the party. After they'd been gone a while, they came back and realized that this character had insinuated himself with the local lord and was now this antagonist character. All this stuff came, and there were a lot of interactions and fun had with it just off a random encounter that I didn't have some plot in mind for that particular character. It was just the dice, then seeing the situation that arose and just playing it—keeping this character once they pop into the world. Even though it's a random encounter, he's not random. Doesn't fall from the sky, right? The idea is that you embed them in the world. It's just something that you and your party could not predict because nobody knew about it at the time.

So I put him in the world as this person who was just kind of cracked. I think he'd hid his spellbook and was pretending to be looking for it. This was just a reason because I was thinking, "What could this person be doing?" The emergent part is taking this thing that nobody could have accounted for, dropping them in, and then as the ripples go out, just playing through the ripples, playing with what the party does. It doesn't matter that you didn't think about this character in advance. You didn't have them in your plans. Anything can be a part of your plan. You're just adding to the fabric of the world. The party gets to respond to things. They may not know it was random, though it doesn't matter if the party knows ultimately.

In the game I play in now, it's very clear when something is the result of a wandering creature check, but it doesn't make them any less real or any less part of the fabric of the world when they show up. In that game, too, we've had lots of relationships, good and bad, arise over individuals and creatures that we just met randomly as we're moving across the map.

In a very open-ended game, you might just want to roll on the generic tables that come with BX or AD&D or the white box or whatever your game of choice is. But I would stress that you really want to make your own custom tables for these—maybe doubly so if you're running an overarching campaign scenario. If you're running the War of the Ring, you probably want a lot of the random events to pertain to the War of the Ring. Whether it's some small chance that the Nazgûl show up, whether it's a band of orcs, it could be refugees, it could be war bands from various kingdoms, or an Eye of Sauron type event where the Eye is searching over and watching and seeing—maybe even just a palantír kind of event where it could be Denethor, it could be Sauron, it could be anybody. Is there a Balrog somewhere that could show up? That could be something, or another creature like the Watcher in the Water. All this stuff is part and parcel of the world, which is part and parcel of the campaign scenario.

So when you're creating this campaign, you say, "Hey, I want to do something." Think about how many of these things trickle into those wandering creature events or encounters or random events or whatever it is, and really embed them in there. If you have a bunch of just generic, really random—random to your world, random to your campaign—kind of stuff, it's going to either dilute the strength of your scenario. Maybe strength is not the right word—maybe the impact, which you can play around with—or you're going to have to then, in the moment, try to figure out what running into this thing means when there's all this other stuff going on.

In fact, if you want to, you could play around with how much of your random events and wandering creatures, etc.—that random stuff—how much of it is directly part of the scenario. Maybe some stuff is indirect. So you could have a thing where in the early years or in the early segments of the campaign, the early portion, maybe up until some kind of key event, then maybe only one out of six—if we're using D6 random tables—let's just say maybe it starts off and goes, "You know what, for the first month or until some other kind of event happens, it's just going to be one in six." Like, the hobbits are in the Shire, and when they're just walking around the Shire, they're going to run into other hobbits for the most part, and maybe there's a one in six chance that the Nazgûl show up. That is basically the extent to which this overarching plot is going to intercede on them at this time.

Then they get to Bree. Okay, now things are moving up a notch, and the party may not have experienced it directly, but I'm going to say these things have happened. Now it's a two in six chance. Now there are multiple Nazgûl tracking them on the road, so we're going to say, "Okay, now there's a two in six chance that the Nazgûl show up." Then we get to Weathertop, and now we say, "You know what, now it's a three in six chance." But even here, since we're in this area of the world and orcs aren't here, it's just the Nazgûl. But now three in six chance.

Then maybe we get to Rivendell and they're there for a while. Whatever. Now it cools back off. But now we're going to the Misty Mountains, and now I'm going to start amping up those encounters again. But it's not going to be Nazgûl—Nazgûl are going to stay at one out of six. Now we're going to have wargs, and maybe there are orcs, and we'll figure out some things there. Then we could have the crebain from Dunland, the birds that Saruman is dominating. We'll put them on there. Maybe we'll leave two as nothing or maybe as something else, right? You can keep playing with those numbers to reflect how much the overall scenario is impacting where in the scenario the players are and where they are.

If you're moving—if there's a flashpoint or a central point of the war or whatever it is—then as you get closer there, you would expect it to be more impactful. As you get further away, you expect it to be less impactful. In this case with War of the Ring, it is a global phenomenon, so it kind of impacts you wherever you are. You can play with that. But the point is you really need to set up all these mechanisms to reflect what's happening. Then, regardless of how the party responds to any individual event, location, wandering encounter, they are interacting with the scenario.

If they decide to refuse the call to adventure—"No, no, no. We're not leaving the Shire. We're going to change our names. We're going to change homes. We're just going to lay low. They're never going to find us." Well, okay. I mean, that's a boring game, I guess, at least for a while. But then stuff's going to happen, right? The war is going to move apace and things are going to happen. Every time they refuse, that stuff is still going on. Every time they decide not to take part in some part of the scenario, the scenario is still evolving. Or if they are interacting with those events, that is also changing the scenario.

Oh, they ran into the Nazgûl at Weathertop, and now he puts on the ring, which helps him see who these Nazgûl really are. Not that they needed to—now they are aware that the ring is in play. They didn't really know before. Maybe they might have known in Bree; regardless, by the time you get to Weathertop, they know the ring is in play, and that directly affects the overall campaign scenario, and then things shift again.

Create Narratives out of the OSR's Dynamic Design Elements

So, the ultimate point of this video is to take these elements that you may hear about in OSR play—which, at least when I'm thinking about it, are location-based events, emergent gameplay—and don't look at them as being somehow antagonistic to having some kind of overarching campaign story or plot or scenario. I prefer "scenario." Think of how those could be tools to help you engage with your scenario.

Maybe, if you are interested in the OSR kind of style of play—and you don't have to be, right? When you get into the 80s and you see adventures start coming, they start off as these very open, sandboxy kind of things and they turn into more or less narrative structures by the end of the 80s. If you want to have a narrative campaign or a narrative adventure, you can do that. But if you are intrigued or interested or you just appreciate the building blocks of modern OSR play, but you still want to have some kind of overarching narrative, I'm telling you, you can do that. You can use these tools, and you do that by customizing them to your scenario and looking at, well, how does the scenario reflect these different aspects of the world, many systems, because all these systems can tie into your scenario.

Then you can have what I think is kind of a best-of-both-worlds sort of situation. This narrative going on, which is this driving force, right? If you're in the Lord of the Rings and you're an adventure type, you're somebody who's active, you're not just a common person. How can I do something to affect this? Or what can I do? Or you're just in it. And I like that. I really do. I like when there's something going on. You talk about tension and ticking clocks and all these things that are pushing things forward.

If the evil god—or, you know, he's not a god, but whatever this Lucifer-type creature is—just bearing down on the world and covering it in darkness, man, that's a really effective way of pushing things forward. It doesn't have to be in the classic narrative sense of you go to A to B to C to D. You can open things up. Lord of the Rings has that concept where they get to Rivendell and they're like, "You got to take the ring to Mount Doom, but we're not telling you how to get there. We don't even know how you should get there. In fact, we don't want to know how you're going to get there, but just get there." Play that scenario more or less as a hex crawler or point crawler or some kind of thing with a lot of freedom.

They end up in different spots. They do different things. They make decisions. Do we go to this side of the river? Do we go to this side? I'm not sure. Do we try to take this path, the front door? Oh, that front door looks really bad. Is there another way around? Yeah, I think there is going around there, right? You can see how their decisions are not dissimilar from decisions that players have made in adventures, where they go and they look at the thing like, "Oh, nope. We shouldn't go that way. We should go this other way." Or let's roll a dice to see whether we stay on the right side of the river or the left. Oh, I don't know. They're on the right side. Maybe we should stay on the left side. I don't know. Or maybe we should go under. Should we go over the mountain? Under the mountain? I don't know. All these things come into play.

I like to say, or I like to think, that both OSR systems and OSR style of play are not somehow anti-narrative or that you shouldn't do classic narrative. But I think there are ways to use the strengths that I see in the OSR systems to scaffold—to add to the scaffolding of a scenario to really create an interesting campaign.

And I know this is a bit wandering and meandering thought, which I apologize for, but I hope you find a little bit of wisdom or at least something to try or something that goes, "Maybe that's an interesting idea." I hope that's the best I can do. But I really think that's something.

So, if you've been interested in these kinds of things and you've been thinking, "How do I do that with the kind of OSR game that I want to play? How do I do that in the kind of OSR community of players that I have?" Here are some ideas for you.
That's all I got. Game on, everybody. Talk to you later. Bye now.