Against the Dark

Nowadays, you can’t seem to find alternatives to Dungeon and Dragons role-playing game without someone eventually mentioning the Old School Renaissance (OSR). For myself in particular most of my games in the past 5 to 6 years have been D&D inspired but simplified, including 13th Age to Old School Essentials and the excellent Worlds Without Number. Currently I am running Planescape in glorious and often times janky AD&D 2nd edition.

Despite the large variety of systems that I’ve used, most of the time I ignore a large portion of the rules as written and simply run my games the old fashioned way - present a scenario, players interact with it, I call for checks as necessary, make rulings, then present a new scenario.

And so I thought - why not just make a game where the focus is on the player making the checks, and the GM on running the game as smoothly as possible? Thus, the idea for Against the Dark was born, hopefully capturing the spirit of being a fun and intuitive OSR style game. I hope you have fun reading and getting to table this, for I certainly had fun writing it!

This work was inspired by World Without Number by Kevin Crawford, Knave by Ben Milton, Mere Gods by Tan Shao Han, Cairn and One Shot World by Yochai Gal, as well as the many RPG starter sets. Submitted as part of the course completion requirements for the Certificate in Graphic Communication (Layout Design and Type) by the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in Aug 2024.