Old School Renaissance

Our adventures are in the tradition of the “Old School Renaissance”, or OSR for short. A style of play that was widespread in the early years of the hobby - the 70s and 80s.

An essential element of OSR is to push the rules into the background in order to allow the players and their creativity to take center stage. Old-school game systems are correspondingly light on rules.

There are a handful of principles surrounding this basic idea, but they are not set in stone and can differ from table to table. These principles include:

• The actions of the PCs have consequences, wrong decisions can quickly lead to the death of the characters.
• There is no fixed plot. Based on the creativity of the players, there are a multitude of possibilities as to how an adventure could end. Failure is one of them.
• Challenges should not be solved primarily with dice, but through the ingenuity of the players. The number of skills is correspondingly limited, if there are any at all.
• The dice create unpredictable events that surprise both the referee and the players.
• Little emphasis is placed on balancing. Adventures for 1st level PCs do not guarantee that all opponents can be defeated by level 1 PCs. Most of them can. For the rest, it is crucial to recognize early enough when a fight is hopeless.
• The game master is a neutral mediator between the players and the game world.

If you want to know more about how to run and play Old School style adventures, check out our blog.

We also recommend the following (free) resources: Principia Apocrypha, translated into German by System Matters Verlag, and the Old School Primer by Matt Finch.

Which rulebooks?

Adventures by Gazer Press are published in German and English. The German versions are written for the Swords & Wizardry (S&W) rulebook, the English versions for Lamentations of the Flame Princess (LotFP).

With only minimal adaptations, however, our adventures can be played with any OSR rulebook.