RetroRoleplaying

As you can see we are still remodeling the site. However, enough is complete that we can reopen. A lot of the ancient cruft that has accumulated over the years has been removed — most will not be back. New material will be coming to replace it.

RetroRoleplaying.com started out as a site devoted to out-of-print, unsupported, and/or out-of-style tabletop roleplaying games (and modern “retro-clones” of those games), started when my wife had oral cancer to give me something else to think about. Then came Microlite74. Within a couple of years the focus of my blog and this site turned from information and discussion about old school style games in general to Microlite74 and the various other Microlite20-based versions of TSR versions of D&D I was creating. This was partially because creating games is time-consuming and because I eventually starting creating these games as was way to get money to pay all the cancer-related bills. For the last 11or 12 years, everything else fell by the wayside.

I turn 65 this year and I’ve retired. The cancer bills are paid. While my wife was diagnosed with MS a few years ago, she has insurance that covers most costs (thanks to the fact that advanced MS is as close to an automatic disability qualification as you can get). So I intend to return the focus of this site to old school and OSR gaming in general again. As I love designing games, I probably will not stop releasing new games. However, the emphasis will not be on selling these games as I am not longer under pressure to make extra money to pay medical debts. Most new games will be free (or perhaps Pay What You Want).

I have a number of plans for this web site, but I haven’t quite decided exactly which of these plans I will go with. The first step in any of those plans, however, is remodeling this site. The fact that I’m far enough long to reopen the site after less than a week is a good sign, I think.

Here are the changes so far:

• New Look – It’s nothing special as I’m still not a visually oriented person, let alone a graphics designer, but it is an updated look. Be warned that I’m still tweaking it.
• Blog moved back to its original home  (blog.retroroleplaying.com on blogger). I’ve cleaned it up to remove all the out-of-date cancer fund drive footers and post solely related to said fund drives.  There’s a lot interesting material there, especially in the early years 2008-2012. Note that most pictures are missing as they were stored on tinypic.
  Update (7 March 2022): I moved the cleaned up blog back to this site from blogger to cut back on Google tracking of blog readers.
• Reviews are gone. This was a silly attempt to link to old school game reviews on other sites in an attempt to provide a centralized list of reviews. I doubt I updated it since 2008 or so. It may have been a semi-decent idea when I started this site, but even if it was its time has long passed.
• Articles — Some ancient and generally outdated or pointless articles have been removed. For the time-being the short game system articles remain, however, they may eventually go as well as they really aren’t that good.

Some of the features I’m considering adding:

• Memberships — The web site will allow people to join so they can participate in some of these features I’m thinking about.
• OSR News — News postings of new games, supplements, adventures, settings, kickstarters, etc. Members producing such things will be able to post such news items directly to this news section.
• Reviews — Actual reviews of old school, OSR, and other interesting rules light games in stead of links to reviews elsewhere. Any I write will probably be short reviews (similar to the “capsule reviews” in the The Space Gamer magazine in the 1980s), but the review section will be open to RetroRoleplaying site members who wish to write reviews.
• Downloads — A download area where free games can be downloaded. Site membership will probably not be required.
• Forum — The forum will use bbpress upgraded with all the nice Dev4Press addons to turn it into a powerful and much more usable modern message board. The prime rules will be no personal attacks and no real world politics of any type.
• Special Interest Groups — Members will be able to create their own SIGs with a forum, document storage, and more. These can be used to discuss specific games, run play by post games, etc.
• Wiki — An easy way to extend the site without having to master complex software.

Naturally, as this site is currently a one-person show, most of these ideas will not turn into reality overnight. Some may not actually happen as not everything I consider a neat idea turns out to be practical or truly useful.

Stay turned for future developments.