Collaborative Creation in OSR

General
#1

Continuing the discussion from What eurofantasy is about:

@chiquitafajita asked about what collaborative creation might look like in the OSR, so I’ll share my personal experiences.

I’ve incorporated collaboration at my table because of my players. If I were to map them to AngryGM’s model of why people play TTRPGs, they’d fall under the Submissive / Expression categories. This means in practice they love making stuff up, and (I love them but) they never read anything I give them.

I knew that player engagement with didactic chunks of GM-created lore would be low, so I took collaborative setting creation guidelines from Perilous Wilds (a Dungeon World supplement) and we each made a continent and a race for the pirate wave-crawl sandbox I’m running. After that, I went back, did up rules for each race, made some classes, and populated the map with modules as befit the tone players went for. (Eg, one continent was a Mushroom Forest, so I dug up some fungus adventures and placed them there in the hexcrawl).

I’ve also taken a mechanic I first saw in Macchiato Monsters (but I’m sure originated elsewhere). Players get advantage to a roll ONCE per session provided they give details about an NPC, setting or experience from their past. The idea was that players would give me hooks that they create, and in between sessions I could reincorporate these individuals and locations.

It’s been working great for some of my players. One of them is very, very enthusiastic about the culture of the race of mole-men he came up with, and a rival he mentioned a few sessions ago has popped up again as head of a rival exploration expedition.

The distinction between this and Storygame collaboration is that players don’t impact the fiction in the moment but collaborate on wider setting details or provide their own hooks that get reincorporated. I’ve also been very influenced by John Harper’s post on Crossing the Line, which is a re-articulation of the Czege Principle (I think). That is, it’s unsatisfying when players are asked to author both their own adversity and its resolution. Besides setting creation, player collaboration is limited to past experiences their PCs would have taken part in.

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#2

Not to toot my own horn, but I use collab worldbuilding in OSR games. I talk about it here.

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#3

I haven’t seen much mention of Beyond the Wall recently but it was one of my first gateways into the OSR, enticing me in with its collaborative town, world and character creation system. I’d love to see more of those sort of tables. An adapted from of the creation system helped the players in the last 5e campaign I ran to buy in the Yoon Suin-lite world, knowing that there here and there were locations their characters had heard something about or learned of when growing up.

There are many great OSR-inspired settings, but they can often benefit the GM more than the players. Having something that the players themselves have prompted, even if it turns out that location itself is a twist on what they expected, can provide that hook to grasp onto when the standard fantasy tropes have been whipped away.

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#4

There are many great OSR-inspired settings, but they can often benefit the GM more than the players. Having something that the players themselves have prompted, even if it turns out that location itself is a twist on what they expected, can provide that hook to grasp onto when the standard fantasy tropes have been whipped away.

I really agree with this. I have a lot of difficulty getting players to buy-in to elaborate settings with lots of existing lore (understandably so, as they’re all full-time working adults with other things to do). Looks like I’ll have to pick up Beyond the Wall at some point and see how it approached collaborative world-building.

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#5

The method I posted earlier (from my blog) is system neutral and partly based on Beyond the Wall, Perilous Wilds, etc.

You can use it with any system. I’ve had great success with Into The Dungeon: Revived for instance.

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#6

that categorization system that lazy dungeon master made sounds interesting. What are all the categories?

Also a wavecrawl! thats what I’m making right now. How has it been running one for you?

#7

I use a very similar method to the post by @yochaigal. I start out almost every campaign with one big situation and the kind of tone I want to run, but then we break out markets and index cards and random charts and go about building the setting for the game ahead.

I often try to do the Beyond the Wall thing of most statements being made by characters or perspectives within the setting to give me (and further statements about the setting) a bit of wiggle room, but I always try to incorporate the intent behind a fact into the game.

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