Yesterday, remembering Zak's great post about dungeons I felt like it would be nice to have a list of links to my OSR required reading. I may make a static page and put up links.
I'm more interested in those articles that go into depth as they examine D&D. I'm thinking the dungeon as Mythic Underworld, D&D as a picaresque, and D&D as a game about ambition. Not so much how-tos, generation techniques, or lists of creative consumables.
I have a lot of these saved on my computer as text files, in a sort of commonplace folder. But I thought if you are just joining the conversation, you might not have seen them yet.
What would your list of must-read links include?
Those three you mention, definitely.
ReplyDeleteJeff Rients' Three-fold Model (silly, but worth knowing)
JB's (Of BX Blackrazor) essay about how badass 1st level characters actually are. Sorry, I've been searching his page for it, but don't have the link.
Less theory, more utility, but Rob Conley's "A Fantasy Sandbox in Detail" series.
ReplyDeleteThanks so much for the suggestions. I'm thinking my brain is too wiped out from work to take on something as taxing as this right now. Maybe I'll just blog a few annotated entries at a time.
ReplyDeleteDo you mean you already had in mind Philotomy's OD&D Musings and Zak's "Where the action is" pt. 1&2?
ReplyDeleteGrognardia has a good essay on the picaresque too, but I don't recall the title of the post.
The cover-to-cover posts at Save or Die! and Sham's Grog & Blog are good too but not quite as focused as what you're talking about.
I think Eiglophian Press had some good posts on the weird in D&D but I never got around to downloading the PDF of his blog after he took it down. Man, I still miss that one.
Swords Against the Outer Dark has some good posts along those lines too.
Sorry I don't have anything specific to recommend! The posts you mentioned above are surely among the best.
Hey, thanks for commenting. Yeah, I was thinking of James M. here:
ReplyDeletehttp://grognardia.blogspot.com/2008/10/picaro-and-story-of-d.html
And, yeah, not the cover-to-cover posts, but Sham's Empty room principle is a great read. Zak had another great post about Noir in talking about Mr. Raggi's game.
Yes, Eiglophian disappearing has made me a little paranoid; the fact that whole chunks of our conversation might just disappear.
If I ever get an E6 campaign up and running Alexandrian's Calibrating Your Expectations would be required reading.
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