“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.“
(Header image by the esteemed Johan Nohr for Into the Odd)

Deep in my hot OSR summer, I came across this particularly bad take on Reddit, paraphrased below.

“As much as I LOVE the idea of Into the Odd, the concept is loose, and there is basically no content for the game. I, or anyone else, could have made the whole game in a creative afternoon. Not worth the money.”

I know. Reddit is generally not the place for good insight. This poorly thought out sentiment has been rattling around in my head for weeks, so I must write it out. It is a bad take. Imagine a similar (fictional) remark on a 5 star steakhouse.

“As much as I LOVE the idea of a sit down restaurant, they only served me a perfectly cooked ribeye and crispy fingerling potatoes, only a few basic ingredients! I, or anyone else, could have made the whole meal in an afternoon. 1 star.”

Stupid. So so stupid. I have seen plenty of tottering stair cars of hundreds of half ideas and mismatched rules. What is much more impressive to me is the stripped down dragster that rockets you into the game at 250 miles an hour, and that is exactly what designer Chris McDowall has done. And that is before considering the wonder of layout that Johan Nohr created in these pages. This game isn’t empty, it’s elegant.

(Look at this! Nohr is remarkable! No one is just whipping up this book in an afternoon.)

What is it about?

You are an adventurer, seeking deep and powerful arcana across a land too large to map. Your character is not built off a set of ancestry, class, and background. You get 4 stats, some starting equipment, and a name. Your character isn’t shaped by the perfect build, or niche rules interactions, or a lengthy backstory. Your character is shaped by the adventures they take. I have seen a million identical human fighters across multiple different systems. But in Into the Odd (despite the “lack of content”), after a few sessions, no two adventures will look the same.

To me, this is OSR. Simple rules and adventurers forged by their trials.

The rules

Your character is made up of four main stats: Strength, Dexterity, Willpower, and Hit Protection (HP). The first three are generated by rolling 3d6 down the line, and HP is a 1d6 roll. The main resolution mechanic is 1d20, roll equal to or under the relevant stat.

Normally I hate the randomness of rolled stats, but two things manage that:

1. This game is not meant to be balanced, you must accept your lot in life and take what you can using wits, cunning, and occasionally well informed cowardice.
2. Starting gear is dependent on how well you rolled. Worse rolls mean better starting equipment. That’s good game design. (Yes, I gushed about this in the Mausritter review too. It’s just great!)

HP is easy to get back, just a quick breath and a splash of water and you can recover, but if your HP goes to 0, you start taking damage to your strength, and that will put you in danger. Even a single point of strength damage can result in unconsciousness and a real possibility of death.

There are no attack rolls. Just damage. That means you will always make progress in a fight, but also means you are always in danger. Just a d6 of damage could put your PC in the grave.

Everything else lives in your inventory, items and arcana to be used in clever ways to solve ancient puzzles. You will notice there is no intelligence stat. No rolling to bypass puzzles and traps, you have to keep your own wits about you, and that means getting creative.

Are the rules sufficient?

Yes. The game just works. I would feel comfortable running this for any group any time, and as long as I have some adventure on hand I don’t need any prep time. This is the game for me. A tired dad working and going to school full time, who doesn’t have time to parse through hundreds of mechanics that may or may not interact with each other. Into the Odd doesn’t get in my way, it just facilitates pure adventure.

(Below are spoilers for the Screaming Horsey Tremors adventure by Symbolic City. Yes that is the name. I adore it.)

I think the real secret to OSR games are not the systems, but the adventures. I ran an insane oneshot that included a failing bank, walking stones, three-eyed star gods and their half-horse half-skeleton apostles. Perhaps the best part was a rival adventurer using the horse disciples as her personal construction crew. So much better than the fare I have come to expect from dungeons in more trad d20 games where they are less puzzles and more just sets of contained combats.

I know I haven’t cracked the surface on the ingenuity in dungeon design going on in the OSR right now. It’s refreshing. And these adventures often only take up 3-4 pages including a map, and fill a 2-3 hour session no problem!

To me, this is OSR. Doing more with less. Taking the time to write the shorter game. On every front, Into the Odd is doing everything it needs to do in exactly the number of words required. It is elegance.

Acknowledgements

Into the Odd can be purchased here.

Thank you to Chris McDowall for making a masterpiece, I know for certain this will not be the last Into the Odd based game I run. Thank you to Johan Nohr for turning a beautiful system into a beautiful product.

Thank you to my brave dungeon speculators: DefinitelyNotGreg the honest lumberjack, NemmaNightbreak the responsible one, Olobosk the failed thief, and TimCurryer the fancy boy new to dungeoning.

P.S. Did you know that Jeff Goldblum (Yes, that Jeff Goldblum) has several studio jazz albums? They are honestly pretty good, would recommend this one.

P.P.S. I think we should change the name of the game master to something that doesn’t quite bestow this air of power, grandeur, and responsibility upon the one running the game, but still conveys that they have a different role. I just have met too many people who think they can’t gm, but they can. Anyone can! There are no special licensing requirements, you can just do it.
I think we should borrow from volleyball, where they have a special position called the libero that has their own specific rules and even wears their own special jersey, but at the end of the day is still part of the same team. Game libero it is.