Making My Own OSR

While I work on larger things, I've found myself needing a new project to work on. I want it to be something that lets me use my game designer brain, but doesn't ask me to write a bunch of words to make something publishable. I've been letting my brain ideate in the background for a bit on this, until I drafted up some random combat rules and shared them with a friend, who pointed out their similarity to Fighting (and why it's Horrible) by Jason Morningstar. That gave me an idea – what if, instead of writing a whole new game, I made a blogpost collage?

So here are the restrictions I'm putting on myself:

• Every rule in the game must be from someone's blogpost.

• The only writing I'm allowed to do is to modify or adjust blogposts (with pencil in the margins) to make them fit each other.

• Everything must be solely recorded in analog form, in a binder, and cannot be shared digitally (although I can share some of the reference points I'm using).

• This is OSR, or at least vaguely OSR-shaped, and thus sticks to the Maxims of the OSR as much as I can.

There are a few softer rules that have emerged as I've been collating blogposts:

• No rules for combat besides the Jason Morningstar rules I linked to above. If combat is a fail state, I want it to suck as much as possible. (That said, I'll be adjusting those rules to accommodate things like monstrous creatures or magical powers, while still keeping the core principles intact.)

• I want to avoid the players rolling dice as much as possible, unless they're participating in a minigame or procedure. No skill checks, but if you're cooking I may have you roll some fun dice shapes.

• I'll probably need to develop systematized rules for converting things like HD and stats into the frankenstein-system as I work on it, so I can more easily run adventures.

Anyway, this is my fun little side project! What do you think? What's your favorite gameable blogpost? Let us know on the forums.

-- Jay Dragon