I ran OSH every single day at GenCon this year, and it was really invigorating to my enthusiasm for this game as well as a wonderful way to share it with fans and new friends who’ve come to love the system as well.

The game has its origins in the pursuit of a play-anywhere “cocktail napkin” level fantasy RPG, and that’s what I wanted to be able to do during my running around Indianapolis, so I put together these 4.25″ x 5.5″ double-sided character cards for quick and dirty gaming.

All you need is for your players to pick a name, pick a talent, and figure out what you’re adventuring after – all things you can do after you’ve started playing, even – and you’re good to go.

The character art is some of the stuff I’ve commissioned for next-level OSH stuff by the inimitable Kyle Ferrin, check his stuff out, it’s amazing and really captures what I want the game to feel like.

The pins this year were made by my awesome friend Stacy D of Frivology, watch for her selling her stuff soon at epicwares.com.

So without further ado:

OSH_GC2012pregens.pdf

Hope they come in handy!

Edit: Corrected the mistake in the cleric’s arena bonus, you may want to re-download!

My current goals seem to be perfectly surmountable, I’ve been hoping to reinvent the main Old School Hack character sheet to something more campaign-play oriented and also build some really awesome Rientsian-flavored Adventure Generation tables both for an OSH DM to architect some extra flavor into their adventure but also provide seeds for more in-line-with-each-other Adventure Goals for the Player Characters.

Well.

Hey, at least I did that logo redesign I’ve been wanting to do.

What would you like to see on a revised Old School Hack character sheet? What sort of format and layout? How would you like it better integrated into the class sheets? Please, let me know!

Beyond that, any regular old words of encouragement continue to be appreciated.

Fortunately (at least for me) I seem to not be at a loss for continuing to play Old School Hack, or at least just Talk About It. Here are some link round-ups of me being blabbery:

• The awesome Brian Engard of 2d6 Cents asked me some questions about the game, which I answered over here.
• If you listen to gamer podcasts, you should definitely listen to the Jennisodes (iTunes link), and she took the time to interview me and break down my love for D&D and my inspirations behind the game.
• Separate from Old School Hack I bounced a new idea for gaming off the guys over at The Accidental Survivors, and we had an awesome time hashing out some interesting game mechanics.
• My friends Lyndsay & Liz recently launched a new gaming blog, and I offered to run an online game for them as a way to celebrate, they wrote up an awesome review here.

So I can’t help but feel that this is just yet more tacky self-promotion in a seemingly endless wait for more gaming goodies from me and I apologize for that. I’m nervous about promising that the next post you see from me will be some honest-to-God new Old School Hack content and that you’ll see such a post soon, but I’m going to try my hardest for that to happen, hold me to it, guys.

In other news, my friends over at The Illuminerdy asked me to write about game design and I probably think of myself as the smallest person to do that, but I did it anyway, check it out. Give their blog some love, they’re good people.

I’d like to specifically call out Kaprou’s amazing work over at Fictive Fantasy in expanding on the game and offering so much amazing work in the Old School Hack vein, so much so that I’ve given him a permanent spot over in the sidebar here.

Recently Old School Hack was mentioned in an RPG.net thread about design & layout, and some criticized it for being too busy.

I think this is fair, actually. Old School Hack’s origins are very much from play-aids, character sheets and quick-reference printouts you can throw down individually to help facilitate play. Its current form doesn’t really read as a book that well because a certain degree of single-page cohesiveness and page individualizing as a goal.

This may be why the game’s layout speaks to some and not to others, I don’t know. I’ve always been upfront about Old School Hack’s nature as an experiment in RPG presentation, and I’m interested in continuing and refining that experiment. The fact that I’m professionally involved in typography and layout design was actually challenging for me to get over – I had to give myself permission to consider it an exploratory, amateurish project.

It’s been over a year now and this has become the highest priority to finalizing the Basic Game, in order to establish a strong precedent for compiling the next Heroic Game tier. I’d like Old School Hack to look more like a book. Of course I’ll keep around the Beta version of the game for Legacy reasons for anyone that prefers it.

As I finally start to get some free time over the holidays and climb back onto the designing horse, my first hopes are to redesign the Old School Hack character sheet from the ground up with Campaign play in mind. I’ll try to drop some teasers as I do so, so stay tuned.

Have a happy set of Holidays, everyone! As gamers, we have much to be joyful for.

I had planned on offering some small increases of power as players reached the next tier. I’m thinking of changing that a bit – making those increases in power still not tied to “leveling” – as in, experience you gain just from playing the game – but instead tie them to in-game quest pursuing, so that that particular advancement is more of an active goal in play rather than a passive benefit of just playing. Developing such a system also feels like it encourages more Campaign-ish play, which is certainly another goal of the Heroic Game (if you’ve gotten this far, you’re committed, right?)

I want to come up with a cool way for players and DMs to come up with a quest – something significant that represents an accomplishment of a goal in-line with the character’s themes, and then tie it to some sort of process or ritual or descriptive event that helps explain the character’s growth in power the way that “just adventuring” explains the character’s expanded breadth of abilities.

Of course it remains important that this not be narratively limiting or morally defining – the quest for power being something of an inherently selfish act that not all players are going to want their characters to be motivated by – so for instance a paladin-y character might perhaps pursue the reward of power as a painful and difficult-to-establish divine commitment to justice or benevolent rulership or something cool like that. Less “reward” and more “commitment to responsibility” or something.

I might loosely categorize them in the same way that the weapon model works so, f’rex:

• Glory - Achieve some feat of prowess that makes you famous, your power comes from a heroic aura.
• Justice - Right a grievous wrong that has been plaguing innocents, your power comes from virtuous recognition.
• Influence - Find a leadership role in the world to fill, your power comes from notoriety and responsibility.
• Wealth - Acquire a magical item of power, your power comes from bonding to it in some way.
• Loyalty - Align yourself to a cause greater than you, your power comes from representation.

I dunno, that’s just throwing things against the wall. Might be interesting to try and tie them into the Attributes in some way, but that might be just a silly attempt at cohesiveness.

And speaking of silliness – it’s a pretty common criticism of Old School Hack that the Awesome Point system can sometimes encourage a certain over-the-topness that makes it hard to play “seriously”. In my own games, I’ve certainly noticed that, but I’m also aware that that’s a tendency to a lot of my gaming in general, I’m a fun-loving, over-the-top kind of guy. But the whole “let’s be as awesome as possible” may seem like something that’s just straight-up psychologically difficult to sustain, so maybe that too erodes people’s interest in long-term play.

Simple solution: What if all you did was change the language? Instead of Awesome Points, call them Hero Points or Thrill Points or something? And then decree that people only hand them out when someone does something Heroic, or particularly Thrilling, or whatever? It seems like that alone could change the tenor of the game subtly enough to give it some gravitas and thus a little more emotional investment.

Just a thought, maybe something to go into a future Afterword/FAQ page or something.