The idea for this campaign came to me during Gothcon 2018 (The biggest rpg convention in Sweden). I was running a Kult scenario at the convention, so I was reading that. I was also at the time starting to get into OSR, and read various LotFP scenarios. Now both Kult and LotFP describe themselves as horror rpgs, but despite this these scenarios couldn't have been more different.
The Kult scenario, like most Swedish convention scenarios included a number of player characters with their dark secrets, as well as a list of scenes to go through and some npcs. The OSR scenarios on the other hand say nothing about the pc's or what scenes can take place. Instead it describes places and npc's. So apart from describing npc's, these scenarios don't even touch each other.
They don't even contradict each other, as they just don't talk about the same things. You could possibly even combine two scenarios, taking the characters from one and the places from the other and populate by npc's from both.
So this is what I intend to do, more or less. I won't combine two existing scenarios, but instead I will write a new one, but with the components you would see in both. Except perhaps the list of scenes.
When asked what characterize OSR one often answer is that it is about exploring environment rather than exploring characters. So in that sense I am investigating a synthesis here in exploring both.
Another inspiration for doing this hybridization was the novel Ringworld, which I also read in past year. It is a story about four people going on an expedition to an ancient ruin, so in that way it is really in the old school style. But exploring the ruin is only half the story, the other half being the exploration of the characters themselves, their secrets and their revelations.
But it should be noted here that its about exploring the characters, rather than expressing the characters.
I'm thinking here about a thing that I have come to dislike about the trad style. That far to often, players make characters by themselves, and then the party consists of a bunch of individuals without any meaningful connection to each other. This often translates to an rpg experience where the different players take turns expressing their character, rather than having a meaningful interaction with the other players.
This can be remedied somewhat by having the players meet up and discuss their characters relations before having them make the characters, but people tend to have a picture of what they want to play before that point anyway. And especially if you as a player is familiar with the system and/or setting, it is hard to not think of potential characters ahead of time.
Both OSR and the convention scenarios do away with problem, but in different ways. In the old school style, your stats are mostly randomized and the actual character is developed during play. Other method is to have the GM create characters. I'm very partial to this, as it allows for some really interesting asymmetric relationships, that aren't initially apparent.
A potential problem in combining character driven story with OSR is the high lethality of the later. In the Kult scenario I run, all of the story was really about the character, and driven by their dark secrets. In particular one of the characters dark secret. If that character had died the scenario would basically have been over.
This isn't an acceptable situation for any old school gaming. The story should be able to go on, potentially even if all pc's die. I have thought about two ways to combat this. First, simply have redundancy. This means having far more pregenerated characters than you have players, and also don't hinge anything about a specific character. The other way I'm going to use is to allow every character that dies, to somehow convey their dark secret. Either with their dying breath, or perhaps with a not left behind.
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