The older man turns to OSR. He doesn’t hold with those sorts of grognards who regard Gygax (or, less often, Arneson) as an infallible prophet, and that the creator’s words and tales of his actions should be put under hermeneutical scrutiny to suss out the “true” D&D, although sometimes he likes to read their investigations. (He was just making it up as he went along, guys, with some poor choices for gameability.) The older man doesn’t believe that 1E is the game perfected, or that B/X should be precisely cloned with its many nonsensical elements replicated into perpetuity (a soldier’s monthly wage pays for only a week’s-worth of food?!). He still thinks 5E got some things right. He prefers “Re-Imagining” for the ‘R’.
His main group is treated to GLOG and LotFP and OSE Advanced rulesets, adventures that last half-a-dozen episodes or so, while the lawyer runs a short Traveler campaign and the best friend eventually delivers a Pirate Borg weekend. The inner city kids face the tables of DCC, and then an OSE Advanced (hack), that has Beyond the Wall-ish lifepaths. Child relatives get to play OSE, Beyond the Wall, and Cairn, and the old man gifts Mausritter to the younger niece (the older niece receives Ten Candles and Alice is Missing). The older man forms a broad collection of players from various online playing groups to run a DCC tour of new-ish praised OSR modules. Answering an online plea, he forms a local group (who so far only plays online) whose refereeing is eventually taken over by another player who runs Dragonbane. He treats co-workers to G.R.A.V.E. He lends one of his co-workers Neo-Classical Geek Revival and in return is loaned Swords and Wizardry White Box. The other teacher enthuses about the OD&D rules. The older man hosts a Mothership module for his spring break. In those couple years the older man purchases and downloads a psychotic number of systems, at least seventy by the last count. His financial situation is as comfortable as it has ever been, despite the post-pandemic instability. He buys way too many miniatures for a person who plays face-to-face fewer than twenty-five times per year. He pays for Kickstarters and Backerkits, and orders bourgeois OSR product from Spearwitch and Exalted Funeral.
The older man joins OSR Discord servers and plays (mostly one-shots) with people who write blogs and publish modules, and plenty of nobodies like himself. He gets to play an FKR and Maze Travellers of the Unknown and The Vanilla Game on the lighter end of the OSR spectrum; OD&Dish (run by Gus L., with Arnold K as a co-player), OSE, Shadowdark, and Conan: Hyborian Age in the middle; and the somewhat baroque Dragonbane and DCC. By pure happenstance, he answers a Roll20 advertisement to join a weekly open table Castle Xyntillan campaign (OSE Advanced), run by a delightful Swedish-Kiwi GM for strangers, and is the only player who is there at the first and final (forty-seventh) sessions. His “main” is a cleric that has 4 hp at level four. The game is so good, he even plays one session quietly from the lobby of a Seoul hotel, starting at 7:00 am local, since that only minorly disrupts his real-life travels. He knows that he must run Xyntillan from the other side of the screen, and does, having equaled his mentor in sessions as of this posting.
The older man begins compiling a heartbreaker, alas.
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