Me, the OSR, Kickstarter, Dwimmermount, and Me

I'm feeling rather at loose ends now that the saga of Dwimmermount seems to be coming to a close. Whatever merit the actual product has will be overshadowed by the drama that ensues when a prominent RPG designer/blogpope goes dark for months and keeps mum while his fans wait for him to make good on a massive Kickstarter project. I feel sympathy for the guy and I'm mystified because he's been a consummate pro in my limited dealings with him. I actually owe him my professional so-called career in RPGs. If he hadn't put a good word in for me at Atlas Games in 2003, then Northern Crown might never have happened. I gotta laugh at the way he's been demonized on the blogs as some kind of Ponzi scheme mastermind. Whatever happened, I'm guessing it was unforeseen, although how he dealt with the resulting mess didn't help his rep. Glad to see that a resolution of sorts is in the cards and I hope he gets back on his horse soon.

If he ever returns to his blog, he's going to find a changed landscape out here. As a driver of big-scale published works, the OSR is done now. Its output has evolved from ballsy is-this-even-legal appropriations of 1st Edition to easy pastiches of the least valuable artifacts of the early days, like rambling megadungeons and superficial re-skinnings of 1e that try to approximate other genres like sf. I think we'll see more OSR blogs go quiet in the coming months. It won't mean that people are turning away from playing older editions of D&D (or clones of same), but that it's not novel or remarkable enough any more to elicit much excitement or debate. Nothing's more toxic to a revolutionary movement than winning.

If I've learned anything from watching the Dwimmermount saga unfold, it's that if I will never do a Kickstarter unless it's truly the only way to get my work into a form that lots of other people can enjoy for a reasonable price. I don't need my game obsession reduced to a dreary obligation -- it's why everything on this blog is free.