Top 5 Old School Games

…other than Spears & Spells, of course.

If you know me, you know I’ve been playing RPGs since what are now Old School Renaissance (OSR) games were just … games. While I adore modern gaming, every so often I need to go back to my roots.

The trouble is, when you take off the nostalgia glasses, the original games have some serious problems. They’re poorly organized, have some really wonky rules, and are just harder to use than modernized versions.

When I stumbled upon it, the tabletop RPG industry was still pretty new (it was the mid-1980s). Since then, the industry has matured. It’s learned a lot about how to create a good game and good game support products.

Back then, the writing was … let’s just say it wasn’t as high-quality as we know it today. I’ll put it this way: Using GGG’s florid prose in the 1E Dungeon Master’s Guide, a dictionary, and a thesaurus, I expanded my vocabulary quite a bit in 1987. It was dense.

These days, retroclones exist that retain the feel and flavor of the originals while cleaning up and better organizing the text. Those are awesome. There are also completely new games that really evoke the old-school flavor (like Spears & Spells, hint hint!), as well as what I call “O5R” games that put an Old School skin over the familiar, comfortable 5e engine. So while I can still pull my original books out, I’d rather stick with the newer stuff.

The List

First up is one that is NOT based on D&D at all. Against the Darkmaster is a retroclone of Middle-Earth Roleplaying (MERP), which is itself a version of ICE’s Rolemaster. It uses a percentile-dice mechanic for resolution and can be really complicated.

[NB: Most folks look to D&D 3.X or Pathfinder for crunch. I laugh in Rolemaster.]

The folks who put together VtD (it’s always abbreviated like that, for “Versus the Darkmaster”, presumably due to language differences) absolutely nailed everything about MERP that I loved, while stripping the Tolkien IP out of it. The themes remain the same (good vs. overwhelming evil, against all odds), the crunch remains the same, the character customization remains the same. But it’s better organized, the layout isn’t as crammed, and they’ve expanded it quite a bit — MERP has around 130 pages and the VtD Core Rulebook is a massive 500+ page tome.

If you just want to take a look at it, there’s a Quick Start book, an adventure, and pre-gens here. Click the image if you want the Big Book.

Next (though these are in no particular order) is Basic Fantasy, by Chris Gonnerman et al. BFRPG is a slightly modified and infinitely better organized retroclone of the 1981 Basic and Expert Sets of D&D. The only real difference is BFRPG uses a few aspects of 3.X D&D, like ascending AC.

BFRPG is now on a new edition. The 3rd edition — pictured at right — is available in PDF and at-cost print-on-demand via DriveThruRPG. The new edition is released under CC BY-SA, in response to the OGL 1.0a fiasco of early 2023; previous versions were released under the OGL. Chris and the gang have taken the opportunity to dust off the rules and layout.

You can get the updated version here.

The best part about BFRPG is that, provided you don’t want paper, it’s absolutely free. The community surrounding the game is friendly, welcoming, and open. It’s the antithesis of the common perception of OSR fans and horrible old grouches.

Beyond the Wall is a fantastic game. It’s like the designers took everything I liked about Old School play, polished them a bit, and then — here’s the kicker — and then slapped on a really clever way to randomly generate adventures.

I mean really clever. Like, the adventure is generated as the characters are being generated. So there’s no need for the GM to come up with hooks. They’re built in.

Unlike some OSR games, this one is well supported with expansion products, too. So you’ll never have the same game twice.

Grab your copy here.

Five Torches Deep is, quite possibly, the most elegantly-presented game I’ve ever seen. I’m not jealous at all, no.

There’s just enough on the page to get you playing. No fluff. No frills. Bare bones and to the point.

Where 5E went back to 1E days, in terms of seemingly trying to obfuscate the rules in a dense cloud of words, FTD gives you exactly what you need to play the game.

What kind of game? Fifth Edition with all the bullshit boiled off and a few core OSR concepts bolted on.

This is the game I use as “training wheels” when players who started with Fifth Edition want to learn what OSR play is like.

While I think FTD is exactly what 5E players who want to peek into the OSR need, it might be too big a departure for them. Or they (or you) might have read a bit about the 1974 rules and wonder how they’d play with the 5E engine.

That’s what Olde Swords Reign is about.

OSR (see what they did there?) teaches the main characteristics of OSR play:

• Emergent gameplay,
• Fast & deadly combat, and
• More reliance on player skill, creativity, and problem-solving than numbers on a character sheet

And it does so while still using familiar Fifth Edition mechanics so it’s easy for folks who only know 5E to pick up and play.

Honorable Mention

Surely you didn’t think we’d forget our own Spears & Spells, did you? It’s not a retroclone. It’s not 5E with the serial numbers filed off. It’s its own thing!

Simple, fast, relies on player engagement and skill over character sheet number-crunching. Give it a go! Get the PDF here and get your print-on-demand here.