I’m currently running a campaign of Frontier Scum and last session I started a hexcrawl using the procedures in the Games Omniverious Hexcrawl Toolkit. Part of that procedure involves coming up with a list of rumors, and I thought to myself, “I love the rumors phase in Good Society, what if I just ask my players to provide the rumors?”
We’ve added a phase of play to our campaign that I’m calling “Around the Campfire” where I ask the players to respond to prompts (either in character, or narrating their character’s thoughts) whenever they are sitting around a campfire eating their beans. For the Around the Campfire before they set off on their hexcrawl, I asked them to each tell me a rumor they’d heard about one of the hexes on the table.
It turned out to be really fun! It got everyone much more invested in the broader hex map beyond their immediate destination, and it fueled some good discussion about which route to take, because they were excited about the rumors they had created.
One of the things that I thought let this storygame/writer’s-room-style moment of having the players make up things about the world fit into our mostly OSR-style game is that because they are rumors, they are both diagetic things that their characters could know, and they might not be true.
In the recent episode of Between Two Cairns “The Smoking Pillar of Lan Yu”, Yochai Gal talks about the the tension between storygame-style shared narrative authorship, and OSR-style challenge-based play. If as a player you are empowered to make up things about the world, it’s hard to feel like you have to use your wits to pilot your character through overcoming a challenge, because you can just invent a fact about the world that solves the problem.
However, my players and I, quite enjoy sharing the storygame-style ability to invent things about the world! By positioning these things as rumors, rather than truths, the GM still has the final say about the nature of the challenges that the players and their characters will need to overcome, but it also allows us to play in the space of shared authorship that we quite enjoy.
Try giving your players an opportunity to make up rumors about the world! I found it to be really fun and create a lot of engagement with the world without sacrificing the central challenge-based mode of play in my OSR game. If you do, I’d love to hear how it goes!
And as a little visual treat, here are some of lovely hexes from Games Omniverious
They’re headed to Rotten Springs. If you’d like to take a dip in Rotten Springs yourself, pick up Gurtie’s Guide VII - Rotten Springs.
P.S. if it’s still February 2025, go check out Kate and my project FOLK Volume II: Travelers of the Inky Void on Backerkit!