Re OSR: This started with me looking at the Kickstarter to fund the 4th printing of Dungeon Crawl Classics. It’s so elaborate! So I thought, huh, I want to learn more about this. And I can find literally nothing online, nothing, that doesn’t come laden with ideological posturing. Nobody’s talking about DCC as a game. It’s a cultural icon, a banner, a manifesto.
So then I started looking into other ones and hoo boy problematic. Adventurer Conqueror King I think everyone knows about. Lamentations of the Flame Princess, also hard to research (and the chatter I hear around Vincent Baker’s Seclusium module again feels ideological and gross), and then I kind of ran out of steam.
Probably the most honest and level-headed take on all this is back when luke crane started running B/X and talking about it. But that’s going back to the ancient tablets. I don’t know if he or Thor Olavsrud really dug into the newly published stuff.