I am shocked and appalled that Save Versus Death wasn't already taken as a name on Blogger. Really, genuinely surprised.
It never would have occurred to me that I, a random novitiate so late to the OSR scene as to be entering in the latter half of 2022, would be the first Blogger to use it as a blog name.
Wild.
So, welcome to the blog. It's about my attempts to get into a) refereeing, GM-ing, DM-ing, etc., in general and b) Old-School Renaissance games specifically. I was going to call it "ARMCHAIR" because I wanted the logo to be a chair made out of arms, but, for whatever reason, some defunct-since-2005 political philosophy blog has denied me that satisfaction. And that's probably for the best. ARMCHAIR, as a visual pun, may amuse me, but it's not exactly on-brand, as they say.
Save Versus Death is very on-brand. Suspiciously so.
There is a TTRPG podcast by the name of Saves Vs. Death. There's certainly room for market confusion, but, I'm not really sure what's going on the "s" at the end of "Saves". It seems stylistically questionable, but maybe the content is good, I don't know. At any rate, that errant "s" is serving a purpose and that purpose is to sufficiently differentiate their fledgling podcast from my completely unread blog. Good job, s.
In an effort to keep this introductory post short, because these things ought not to take up more space than necessary. But some sort of introduction is in order:
Hi, hello.
I have pretty much always liked the idea of table-top gaming, but have rarely found the time or consistent-enough companionship for it, so I have mostly spent my interest in it on a purely theoretical plane. That said, at some point in the past year--lying awake, wondering where all the time goes, as one does in their thirties-- I was fretting about how few books I've managed to read in the last few years when it suddenly dawned on me that, while I've only read a handful of novels and non-fiction titles, I had read a ridiculous number of gaming rulebooks and manuals.
I am absolutely one of those people who lurks on DriveThruRPG and HumbleBundle and Bundle of Holding and buy RPG rulebooks I don't need. But I do tend to read them. I find rulebooks and adventure modules and Bestiaries and Alien Archives relaxing to read in a way nothing else is.
With this vast weight of unutilized knowledge wedged between my ears, its small wonder that when I made a pseudo-bucket list for myself on my most recent birthday, running a TTRPG was on it.
But what system!?
My friends, I was lost in a sea of potential. So many possibilities whizzed through the dank, listless recesses of my psyche, wending through ooze-clung tributaries of ill-used gray matter. Warhammer 40,000: Deathwatch? Too crunchy! Tiny Dungeon 2e? Not crunchy enough! Just do 5e? Bah, everyone does 5e!
Then, like a beacon standing upon a rocky cliff, calling me to safe harbor, Old-School Essentials blinked ahead on the horizon.
Reading OSE books and adventure modules, and using them as an excuse to explore the original Gygaxian version of the Greatest Adventure Game has been very fun and oddly inspiring in a way few other systems have been.
So, that's what I'm running. And, since I didn't feel up to creating a whole setting for my first go-round, I decided to go whole-hog on the OSE thing and run Gavin Norman's still-in-development setting Dolmenwood.
I have a lot to say about all of this (thus the blog) and am weirdly excited about it (thus, again, the blog).
Anyway, musings forthcoming!
