Talking about the Grognardpunk Manifesto

I recently uploaded a document titled the Grognardpunk Manifesto. Why?
Let me start from the very beginning ;)

I started out my RPG journey as an "old school" roleplayer.
I used to play (to death) the original HeroQuest boardgame. Then someone mentioned to me a game that was "similar but without a board, trust me it's great". Thus my first RPG ended up being Mentzer's Red Box edition of D&D. But at the time (early 90s in Italy) I had little to no contact with "the culture" surrounding the game, so my one and only source of truth to learn how to play was the rulebook. And boy, it wasn't smooth sailing. I experienced the whole gamut of bad play experiences one can expect from being complete n00bs wrangling with the quirks of those rulebooks. This went on for some time, with alternating fortunes, shifting play groups, and through the Red and Blue and Turquoise D&D boxes.

I later moved on to other games, in the mid to late 90s, with much better results, mostly because there was much more of an RPG culture surrounding them, people to play them with, to share experiences, to be confronted with. At least in the city of Rome. These games were Call of Cthulhu, Vampire the Masquerade, Cyberpunk 2020, Shadowrun, SLA Industries, WasteWorld, Over the Edge, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Unknown Armies, and so many others.

I later later moved on to other other games, in the late 2000s, unwittingly stepping in the middle of a kulturekampf. Ouch. Still it broadened my horizons and rekindled my passion for RPGs (which had been burning out). These games were Dogs in the Vineyard, Don't Rest Your Head, FIASCO, My Life With Master, Annalise, The Shadow of Yesterday, Apocalypse World, The Quiet Year, and so many others.

Throughout this journey I never lost the appreciation for a good old dungeon delve, but I also couldn't help but notice that (for me) it all came with a ton of baggage, hidden costs and strings attached that I personally did not care for. So I mostly spent my time playing  other kinds of stories. This is where I come from. Where I am going to go, after much playing and pondering and researching and discussing, is in a direction that is perfectly normal for Modern design but for some reason I don't really see explored much. 

Many people consider Modern RPG design to be limited to "narrative heavy" games. Some even started calling all games with a Modern design "Story Games" or "Storygames". I reject this notion, as to me the whole point of Modern design has always been "just" about the application of aware and conscious rules design to the achievement of a desired play experience. The preponderance of "story games" has more to do with historical circumstances, a focus on emotional and narrative play after decades of Traditional design focused on action-oriented escapism, than with anything intrinsic to this design philosophy.
Modern games exploring different creative priorities have always existed, but were few and far between, probably because they were trying to do something that was not particularly appealing to the majority of their own culture, while also being too alien for the players of other RPG cultures.

But the potential is and has always been there, that's what I am saying.

Enter, the grognardpunk manifesto.
It represents the fruit of my ongoing research in the "old school playstyle": what could have been the design goals and aims behind the original old rules, plus all the unwritten but still very stringent oral rules that make up the "culture" surrounding the OSR (Old School Renaissance) in all its different incarnations.

One does not simply say OSR ^_^'

• There is the early OSR, which is exclusively about producing "new support material for old editions of D&D", where old means specifically OD&D and B/X.
• There is the middle OSR, which includes the most high-fidelity retroclones and the small modifications they sometimes introduce.
• There is the more recent OSR, which includes other "old" D&D editions as well as "old" non-D&D games and new D&D-inspired games, all united under the flag of a more or less common "play style" ... as they call it ... a mix of very Traditional the-GM-is-the-Game design philosophy tempered by a rich layer of cultural norms all revolving around an idealized "old style".
  I once wrote a frustrated blog post criticizing this segment, mistaking it for the whole and misunderstanding its intimate identity.
• There is the "purist" offspring of the OSR culture, the FKR (Free Kriegsspiel Revolution) that pretty much rejects "rules" as evil and therefore relies on homeopathic rulebooks and the power of a very strict "culture" based on complete trust and good faith (and a thousand unspoken norms) between Players and GM.
• There is the "experimental" offspring of the OSR culture, the NSR (New School Revolution) that shows a lot of promise and passion, but struggles to find its identity, torn in between a desire to explore new rules and mechanics while loathing the idea that rules and mechanics could bear any relevance to an "old school" game. Still, they try, prod and explore.
• There is even a flourishing (?) "crapware" industry built around the idea that if you slap the OSR logo on something, it will sell more, no matter how relevant (or even just good) the content is to the games and culture it references.

So I have been researching into all of this as material to put into focus the play experience I want to bring at the table, translating oral wisdom and best practices, the culture and its unwritten norms, into a tentative map of concrete Modern design goals. That's the grognardpunk manifesto.

The game I am designing based on it will not be OSR. Not by any stretch of the term. And that is fine. It's going to be gmLess and rogueLite, partly cooperative and partly competitive, a strange thing. But maybe it will be able to appeal to some OSR players, as a weird and pleasant diversion from their true passion. That would be nice :)