Quinns' Campaign Diaries, Vol 2 Pt 1
Added 2026-02-02 14:22:18 +0000 UTCComments
So real! I think Tim actually got the idea from reading the post I did on Quinns Quest about Doomsong, and how that game tells the story of not a party of individuals, but the guild that they belong to. I really think that something like this is such a necessary step for TTRPGs that want GMs to deal in... not death, necessarily, but *tension*. It sharpens the knife and puts it in your hand.
Quinns Quest
2026-02-04 11:19:24 +0000 UTCPoor Mother Jaeger in our campaign has 3hp, so her having the ability to harm herself to do magic is very stressful and exceedingly funny.
Quinns Quest
2026-02-04 11:17:54 +0000 UTCHonestly, I see post tags as punchlines that moonlight as navigation links
Quinns Quest
2026-02-04 11:12:48 +0000 UTCGlad to see this. I also tend to distance myself from OSR games, but it's mostly because the settings don't really offer a cohesive version of the world. Interestingly you mentioned Dolmenwood, and my primary gripe with that is we have a Duke but absolutely no ideas about where this Duchy pays taxes to, something that I feel would matter a great deal to the Duke's day to day motivations. Dolmenwood is big but somehow still feels like this floating and disconnected place. (I love other things about Dolmenwood. The fairy tale feel is fantastic) Sounds like Outcast Silver Raiders is offering more of a robust version of the world, which I appreciate. I still have a tough time with a game that hard frames such dire circumstances. In other OSR games I'm often feeling like "Why can't I be the baker? You go die in the dungeon I'll make warm bread, thank you." but at least with a cohesive setting as the GM I can portray a world in which we treat the game more as a narrative experience about desperate people with the limited skillset of "violence"
Brandon Johnson
2026-02-03 15:57:27 +0000 UTCThose post tags are wild.
Yancey
2026-02-03 13:36:58 +0000 UTCI think the expectation was clear that these would be previews of things that you were INTENDING to become full on feature length reviews. If they didn't, the reason would likely become apparent in the BTS discussion. So I don't think you're backpedaling a promise, if that helps :D
Jack Lightfoot
2026-02-03 03:02:15 +0000 UTCI love how this gamifies "next of kin". XD Go Maude! Also, love Raiders! So glad you're giving it a shot. I hope y'all have a blast.
Doc Webb
2026-02-02 19:26:11 +0000 UTCLove the bottle idea. I always like to say that the story that results from something like this often won't be the story of any one character or group of characters, but of a living world (or in something like Mothership, possibly the group's spaceship if they have one). Of course, that also means when a PC *does* survive and go on to do heroic things and make a big mark all their own, they feel that much larger than life.
Garrison Gondek
2026-02-02 18:40:29 +0000 UTCYeah, for me the thing that draws me to OSR (and related) stuff is that feeling of *scrappiness*. The PCs are scrappy underdogs in a deadly world, and survival and success feels heroic all on its own. Admittedly I tend to focus less on grittiness and lethality--"scrappy" and "dangerous" are the words I like more. There's probably a reason my gateway into OSR stuff wasn't through D&D retroclones, though. Mothership, Mythic Bastionland, and Cairn ended up getting me to appreciate the playstyle itself (which then helped me start to understand the retroclones that I'd written off in the past). I don't have any particular loyalty to D&D mechanics either way.
Garrison Gondek
2026-02-02 18:39:10 +0000 UTCCheers to the return of campaign diaries! Your hesitation around OSR is totally reasonable. I think what's special about the playstyle for me has little to do with trad fantasy and more to do with the manic energy of being a perilously fragile lunatic scrounging around in places that *will kill you* as a way to make a living. The idea of using real world religions is an interesting one. You mentioned that none of the folks involved are religious in real life, so this might not be a conversation that your playthrough/these diaries can't really explore, but I do wonder about the... well, "ethics" feels like too strong a word, but I guess I wonder how it the game would feel if you *did* have someone at the table who was religious, maybe even specifically Christian. How would that impact the experience? Maybe not at all! Religious oppression is a cultural/historical event as much as a spiritual/philosophical stance, and on first blush that seems to be more the angle that OSRaiders is leaning into, which I can totally imagine working for players of all walks of faith. But I can also say that I have seen my (non-abrahamic) faith tradition get trotted out as an aesthetic playground before, and it is not an awesome feeling. ¯\_(ツ)_/ I have no real argument on this front, just thinking out loud, so to speak. Looking forward to the next one! The encounters sound horrid.
Ennis Jackson
2026-02-02 16:33:26 +0000 UTCI picked this up during the Black Friday sales and have been slowly flicking through it. I really like the art in this, stylised red and black just pops off the page, not a super fan of the gloss pages but that's just a hand feel thing. Also it might be a trigger for some people but the way the sorcerer gets their power through SH is interesting as a restriction. I think it's very thematic.
Bodie Spark
2026-02-02 15:59:14 +0000 UTCRelatable. Whom amongst us haven’t stayed in a bad relationship just so if we died our partner would inherit our XP and we could continue adventuring through them.
William Melton
2026-02-02 15:45:58 +0000 UTC
