OGRE GATE AND THE OSR

I wanted to tackle a question and point I sometimes see, which is confusion over the description of Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate and whether it is an OSR system. 

SOME BACKGROUND

When me, Dan and Bill first sat down to make Ogre Gate, we thought we were making a simple RPG. We used the word simple a lot if I recall. Very quickly, certainly by the time Ryan joined in on the design, we clearly understood this wasn't the simple martial arts game we were imagining, and we felt that wasn't a bad thing. The Network system games prior to Sertorius were very simple, and the game became more crunchy as we added magic.

In hindsight, if we were to do it again, we might place the crunch in different places (there are sections of the combat rules and areas of character creation that seem less important to us after years of playing). Some of that is because our tastes have changed but some of it is because the two year design period for making a game (we always allow about two years). 

I find two years is a very good baseline for design (one year isn't enough in my opinion). But that two year period is one where you are actively engaging all the elements of the system. After about four or five years, you naturally start to drop certain things at your table and you develop a different understanding of the game. 

So were we to do a second edition or a revised edition, certain things might get streamlined. But what wouldn't change is the heart of the system, the hundreds of Kung Fu Abilities and the way character creation works around skills. And most of the crunch would remain. It would be a dense game clocking in at over 400 pages even if we streamlined some of the character creation choices. 

As I said, it is a crunchy game, so I find it is best to embrace that (even if I find my aging brain relying on people like Ryan to remind me if I forget a rule). The game is meant to reward good choices, and it is meant to emulate the full range of abilities one sees in wuxia and martial arts movies, with each one having a distinct mechanical effect. One thing we didn't want to hand wave was how distinct each martial arts technique can feel in wuxia and to achieve that we felt each ability should function similar to spells in Sertorius. It had to be robust for it to work how we wanted. 

IS OGRE GATE OSR?

In my mind two things firmly take Ogre Gate outside of the OSR: 1) Characters are built around skills and their Kung Fu Abilities; 2) It uses the Network System, not a d20 system with classes. There are other things too but these are notable because they are at the core of the game itself. Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate is not an OSR game in any sense that I would recognize. 

Yet, it does often get described as an OSR game, it has been said to have "D&Disms", despite being a skill based system that uses dice pools with no classes or anything resembling a d20 retroclone. Why the confusion? 

Some of this is my own fault, because I mention the OSR frequently when I am posting about my campaign structures, and the internet being what it is, people draw assumptions from that. I am personally a fan of OSR games, when I play D&D I usually gravitate towards older editions, and I love the approach to adventure structures you find in the OSR. This last part is especially notable because it is something Ogre Gate has in common with the OSR.

ADVENTURE STRUCTURES

A lot of my sensibilities around adventure structure come from the OSR. While I play a wide range of games (including OSR games) mostly I play my own games because it only makes sense to me to play the games I make (if I don't like them, why would anyone else bother with them?). I was someone who had something of a GMing crisis in the early 2000s, where I just found the approaches I had been using and the approaches that were predominate, not clicking with me any longer. I wanted to be more surprised, for my adventures to be less scripted, and started looking into things like sandboxes and investigative adventures more. This eventually led me to OSR games, OSR gaming threads, and I had most of my GMing conversations with OSR Gamemasters and designers, even if I wasn't a strict OSR gamer. 

There is also a practical element here. I understood from years of playing RPGs and different kinds, that something about the core concepts in D&D worked for long term campaigns. There are other games that 'work' in this way. And one could debate endlessly the reasons (i.e. why is Call of Cthulhu the perfect one shot or mini-campaign system?). I knew I wanted Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate to be more of a long term campaign system (prior to Stories, we understood that our games were more niche and likely to be played in shorter campaigns). 

I had run a number of wuxia campaigns in different systems and the adventure structures I used for them in my d20 campaigns, always worked. Including things like dungeons, monsters, exploration and wandering encountered, these all kept up the longevity of the campaign. And the more I looked for these things in wuxia media, the more I realized they were often just as present (with the exception of monsters in strict wuxia films and stories) as they were in fantasy. 

WANDERING HEROES 

During playtest the "Wandering" in Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate was heavily emphasized. The playtest setting was designed as a sandbox, based on concepts I had worked in other campaigns for different systems, including an old d20 wuxia campaign I ran. The Witch of Zhaoze Zhou originates here for example, as does General Dee and many other elements. But the whole Banyan region and the empire were built from scratch with an eye for exploration, character driven feuds and sect conflicts, and drama. 

What I wanted was to be able to run a game whether you had prepped or not, by just dropping the players down and letting them set a course for themselves. So things like Grudge Tables arose around this (obviously it comes from wuxia but the need for a table became apparent after players developed a few grudges and I noticed they were easy to forget about without a prompt). The game included fairly traditional encounter tables as well, which works for the wandering character element and is obviously rooted in older school play. 

What set Ogre Gate apart in my mind was we placed special emphasis on characters and sect, and we included dramatic elements (something I think of as not very OSR). 

Also the hex maps were made Robert Conley who makes a lot of OSR material, and has a number of blog posts on how to run sandboxes (recommend these highly). The location maps, which were by Michael Prescott in the original core book, and done by Francesca Baerald in all the supplements, are often dungeons. My sense is dungeons are something people don't really expect in a wuxia game. 

Just as a side note, one of the things I kept seeing in discussions about wuxia when the concepts of Ogre Gate were brewing was how difficult many people found it to run and how intimidating it was. Part of this was setting. But a lot of it was a genre expectation that some people had a hard time imagining as easily gameable. However if you watch a long form series like Legend of Condor Heroes, it is very easy to see that as a pretty standard campaign. It has a lot of the elements, including locations I would label dungeons (and this is more the case in other stories and movies). And besides, it isn't like every fantasy dungeon features a a dungeon either, yet most fantasy settings are filled with them. They are a conceit that works, but if you watch films like Buddha Palm or House of Traps, even Dragon Swamp or Web of Death, these are quite easy to naturally fit in (and there are countless other wuxia films featuring cavern complexes, underground headquarters, and all sorts of things that could be described as dungeons. And this isn't even getting into inns (wuxia probably has far more inns than standard fantasy in my opinion, plus it has teahouses, wineshops, restaurants, and brothels). It is all quite gameable and also I think sometimes more relatable to a modern person than medieval Europe. 

So I can see how Ogre Gate confuses some people into thinking it's OSR. What I like to say is it is a robust system built around powers that does have a simple core mechanic. It isn't OSR but it has a bit of an OSR spirit and some OSR DNA in its approaches to things like adventure and campaign structures, GM tools, etc. I wanted Ogre Gate to be a game many in the OSR would enjoy, especially around how the setting and system deal with genre (I tried as much as possible to make it a natural part of the setting cosmology). 

For those looking for a more OSR take on Ogre Gate, I suggest trying Strange Tales of Songling. This is very much a B/X inspired revision of the core Ogre Gate system. It isn't a retroclone or d20, but it comes much closer to an OSR experience than the original Ogre Gate.