Posts Tagged simulacrum games

About as scrappy and loosely organised as the original roleplaying hobby, retro-clone roleplaying games (or ‘simulacrum games‘ to some) are spreading across the web, gradually gaining converts to their cause: a return to fast-paced, imagination-led roleplaying.

Most of them have a lot in common:

• They’re inspired by the early editions of Dungeons & Dragons.
• They use Wizards of the Coast’s System Reference Document, under the terms of the Open Gaming License.
• Best of all, most of them are free to download, with no strings attached.

Just add dice and you’re ready to play.

Why play a ‘retro-clone’?

You might ask why anyone would want to play these games, when Dungeons & Dragons now has a 4th Edition, and thirty-plus years of recognition behind it.

Well, the reasons are as varied as the players, but for most, it seems to be simple: they want to get back to something that they feel has been lost. Away from enormous rulebooks and mountains of supplements, they want their imagination to take hold again, to run things fast and loose, and to experience roleplaying as they remember it.

While you can easily argue that roleplaying games don’t ‘force’ you to play any particular way, it’s also hard to argue with history and tradition. So if you’re fed up with people throwing rules in your face, or you just fancy getting back to the ‘old school’ way of playing without hunting down out-of-print rulebooks, there’s probably something for you here.

Secret origins

While there may be some people who’ll come to these games completely fresh, perhaps even as their first roleplaying experience, I think it’s more likely that they’ll be introduced to them by someone else – someone who played the original games that inspired these clones.

As one of those people myself, when I first heard about these games, I wanted to know which retro-clone was inspired by which original game. I figured that would help me gauge whether I was interested in using them, based on my memories of the original game, and frankly, I was also just curious.

Unfortunately, most of the retro-clones don’t explicitly state their ‘inspirations’ – basically because of the legal terms of the Open Gaming License, which do not allow them to position themselves as direct replacements for those Other Trademarked Games which usually feature an ampersand in their title. As a result, I had to do some research to determine exactly which game, and which edition of which game, inspired what. (Then I made some pretty pictures to make it really clear.)

As I haven’t agreed to any binding legal license, however, I don’t have to be coy as to what inspired what – even though it’s just that, inspiration. I want to be clear that while most retro-clones use the System Reference Document and will therefore have very familiar mechanics and systems, that does not mean they’re direct copies of Dungeons & Dragons. Instead, they’re inspired and derived from it, and that means all of them will be slightly different from the original… even while they feel very much the same. In other words, my use of an ‘equals’ sign in the pictures below is meant to be interpreted very loosely.

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