And the using of the background for skills opens up that "player skill" stuff that the OSR talks about. Come up with a compelling case to the GM that because you are "banished" that you know how to do something?
That's an interesting question. For Shadowdark, the Western Reaches are pretty much generic fantasy. It's pretty much designed to be dropped into any sort of D&D-ish setting. I'd say whether you consider it OSR or not depends mostly on rules. Is OSR limited to pure retroclones or is a modern 5E...
To start, a D20 class/level based fantasy game descended from Dungeons and Dragons. I play a lot of games that occasionally get tagged as OSR like Call of Cthulhu or Dragonbane, and they match a lot of the traits of OSR games, but I think it's really just the D&D descended ones that count. But...
I would assume all backers are eligible for a refund and PF1 is just a shorthand.
OTOH, in their latest proclamation from the Overlordbunker, the Bledshaws claimed they were going to be doing their own release of CSIO, now that Goodman has paid their debts off. So possibly it's only the PF...
So this contract has a disparagement clause that would prevent saying it was signed before 2020 or that they're obligated to fulfill the terms because that would damage sales, but at the same time it allows Goodman to repeatedly take to video to talk about how reprehensible the Bledshaws are...
I had a really memorable character in Weird Frontiers, the weird west DCC offshoot. I rolled 4 for STR, but otherwise ok stats. Why would they have such a low strength? It came to me: Because they're old! So I created Old Sally. (Pronounced "ole" held out long and with a western twang.) She was...
If you really want a history of TTRPGs, that would be the ultimate IMHO. When I was making my meager and now embarrassing contributions in the 80s, there were no contracts for authors, not even a terms of service. You just sent stuff and technically, you were paying her to print your "zine."...
The Bledshaw JG kickstarter is so old that it predates 5E. It was being done in a similar fashion to how Goodman does things, one house version "JG Universal" and one of the dominant D20 RPG which at the time was still Pathfinder 1.