OSR Errant

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

So, at the suggestion of several folks here, I've read the free version of Errant.

And it's definitely interesting.

The big hook for Errant is that it's full of procedures for doing things.

• Travel has a procedure
• Exploration has a procedure
• Initiative is a procedure
• Downtime is a procedure
• The duration of resources, including rations, ammunition and magical effects is a procedure
• Light sources have a procedure
• Inflation has a procedure
• Item rarity is a procedure, tied to settlement size
• Item quality and breakage has a procedure tied to item usage
• Creating spell effects via grimoires or miracles is a procedure
• Chases are a procedure

And there are many, many more procedures.

A lot of it is very interesting and it fits together very well, using if not a unified system, variants of a pretty simple system used throughout.

But it adds up to being a lot to handle and remember. And while the systems are nominally modular, a lot of them refer to other systems, so in some cases, they're pretty well emmeshed into the core of the game. (If you decide you don't like how spells work in Errant, it's going to be hard to replace the system without a bunch of other stuff being impacted, by my read.)

This would work great as the basis of a computer game, where a computer runs all these procedures. Overall, it's a pretty clean system, as long as you're not expecting a referee to keep it all straight in their head without a ton of game-delaying page-flipping.

When Shadowdark was first announced, we had a ton of angry OSR bros showing up at ENWorld, sneering that the game didn't have enough procedures, and how could it really be an OSR game in 2023 without them, but I am skeptical that many people are running Errant as written, versus marveling at it as a beautiful clockwork design -- which it definitely is.

Errant seems like a good system to steal from for other OSR games, although even there, conversion is going to needed to make many of them work with other systems. (Attack rolls by mounted combatants are enhanced by one step for an ordinary mount, or even more for an especially large or ferocious mount. What "enhanced by one step" means in other systems is going to have to be worked out by the GM.) Procedures for super-specific things, like the PCs spreading information throughout a community, are certainly skippable, though -- and this nicely illustrates how detailed some aspects of Errant gets.

Character classes, monsters and spells don't really work like they do in other OSR games, making Errant more of an inspirational text than something to lift from directly in these cases:

npcs from other old-school role playing games may be used as is with little modification.

To convert hp, take half an npc’s ascending armour class and multiply it by their hit dice.

To determine their threat, use their hit dice value. If their hit die is higher than 10, take their converted hp total and divide it by 12 to get their threat; if this value is still higher than 10, simply treat their threat as 10.

To determine movement dice, treat every 20’ of encounter movement rate as granting 1 movement die.

I think we have differing opinions of what "little modification" means.

I have long felt that there were RPG products meant to be played and RPG products that were meant to be read. Errant, to me, feels very much like a game that only author Ava Islam may be capable of running well, although as a list of ideas -- particularly of the OSR Google+ style of "hey, this is a cool idea for a subsystem" type -- it's extremely interesting.

 

[Jahydin]

I have long felt that there were RPG products meant to be played and RPG products that were meant to be read. Errant, to me, feels very much like a game that only author Ava Islam may be capable of running well, although as a list of ideas -- particularly of the OSR Google+ style of "hey, this is a cool idea for a subsystem" type -- it's extremely interesting.

That was my first thought: "How could I retool these mechanics as "seasoning" for upcoming adventurers I want to run...?"

 

[Jahydin]

Cool to @Gus L in the credits too!

 

[overgeeked]

Yeah. For me Errant isn’t a game to run, it’s a toolbox to take specific tools from. Or used for inspiration. Etc.

 

[Gus L]

Cool to @Gus L in the credits too!

I've also written the first adventure for it "Curse of the Ganshoggr" (which is free) and converted "Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier" to the system as an option (It's PDF only and free if you have the other PDF/hardcopy).

Both are available on .itch and DTRPG.

 

[timbannock]

While I can't deny it has a lot of internal referencing, it's only the "biggest play loops" that end up being difficult ecosystems to tweak.

Example 1: I used the travel rules for Shadowdark in place of SD's original hex crawling rules. It worked great because Errant became ALL of those travel rules. Now that Cursed Scroll #4 is out, I like those better, so I've had to rip out basically ALL of Errant's travel rules. Which is fine, but it's definitely a big chunk of the book. (Note: I still retain the Event Dice, slightly modified for SD.)

Example 2, which is the flip-side of Example 1: Loads of the downtime systems are pretty independent of each other. While there's still some internal referencing, many of them work perfectly well alone, and some are even meant to be "only at X scale" where X would be campaign-dependent, such as "Okay, you're all level 9, so now it's time to carve out a domain," which might start with a single institution, then grow to a domain, etc. Anyway, the independent systems I've used are crafting, alchemy, legal trials, conspicuous consumption (which is a great replacement for SD's simpler carousing), and several others. These all just sit there as their own thing. If you use downtime Event Dice, that might force you to have to use a lot more of the procedures in tandem, but even then, ignoring things like Rivals, Bonds, Factions, and Scourges can be done without changing anything, or ignoring/changing a single die result (for Scourges).

Basically, it's a lot more interconnected seeming than it really is, because the language is such that it's presented as an all-or-nothing game. But it really isn't. My biggest beef with the game -- and also what sets it apart from everything else and gives it so much personality, so I'm not sure that I'd change it -- is the sort of "modernized high-Gygaxian" language of it all. It's meant to be esoteric, and that's both a feature and a bug, depending on how much work you're willing to do to cut to the meat of the systems beneath it all.

 

[zakael19]

At least one person is running it besdies the writer, over at Deeper in the Game he did a series on Errant in 2024 talking about the classes and then how he approaches running it. I'm torn between this FITD / D20 fusion and Freebooters on the Frontier (PBTA/ B/X fusion) on the dungeon-crawly ruleset I'd be most interesting in trying some day.

 

[Celebrim]

So, at the suggestion of several folks here, I've read the free version of Errant.

And it's definitely interesting.

As fantasy heartbreakers go, it's pretty well done - at least at the level of reading. It is a hodge podge of ideas stolen from other game systems ("Blades in the Dark" looms large as it seems to over almost all recent game designs) and it is interesting reading a fantasy heartbreaker that doesn't entirely default to D&D as its core assumptions. This isn't merely "D&D plus some other stuff". But it might be "Blades in the Dark and Ironsworn" plus some other stuff.

For me it hits a bad spot between abstraction and simulation where the level of abstraction is not so high that the game is simplified, but too high to really feel like the abstractions are anything but gamist.

Like you I'm inclined to want to see this as something like a complex version of "Oregon Trail" played solo and not so much as something that I want to run. But my interest in turning this into a computer program is dampened by just how much of the text is littered with exhortations to apply GM fiat. Also, there are hints "Darkest Dungeon" is one of the mechanical inspirations behind all of this.

Which means it is hitting right in another bad spot of me, which is you have the appearance of having procedures for handling any situation but the procedures aren't trustworthy enough to run a game off of, and so really the GM is left to resolving a lot through fiat and judgement calls. If the end result of a procedure is, "If this doesn't make sense, do something else instead", you might as well not have a procedure.

For example, reviewing the social combat rules, I do think this is the best attempt at social combat rules I've seen, and I like how he's treating the NPC's hit points like a clock and you have to win before the clock runs out. This is a good example of modifying the rules for a conversation to make them more like a conversation and less like the logic of combat. But for all that, this is again in that not so sweet spot of providing a procedure complex enough to slow play down but not robust enough really feel realistic and so in practice you are relying heavily on fiat not just in setting up each interaction correctly but in ruling on everything that happens.

As another example, his "inflation" rules creating not only local but regional price spikes are cute, but utterly unrealistic in the vast number of cases. Why should depleting the supply in a village that can sell 10 units of supply have any effect on the prices on a nearby metropolis that can sell 160 units of supply? There are no modifiers on the effect of inflation but distance, but it should be obvious that depleting the supply in a metropolis impacts the village considerably but not the other way around. To make this work you need other modifiers that take into account relative population. Also, is it really realistic that a hamlet with population of 10 has only 1/16th of the available supply of a metropolis 1000 times its size? There is more gamism here than simulation.

That said, am I probably going to start thinking about social interactions in terms of a clock now, at least in the abstract? Yeah, that does solve a real problem I've had running social interactions where it's not clear when or how to stop the interaction when progress isn't being made.

I do love procedures or "mini-games" as I've tended to call them in the past. I like the idea of this better than I like the implementation, but I also love on some level how he's mining some of the best mechanics out of modern fantasy games and blending them with OSR and does have some interesting insights of his own. So, interesting reading but would never run this.

 

[zakael19]

*she. The Author is Ava Islam. As called out in the OP's post.

Interestingly while there's obvious BITD influence, if you read some of the design blogs and entries you'll see that some of them are in direct answer to and discussion with the OSR blog-world and other designers tackling similar problems. She has a good discussion of what she thinks about as procedures and how all the ones in that book came to be included here as well.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

I played Errant at a con last spring, and my recollection is that, of all the systems and subsystems, the only one that was a real bear in play was the inventory/encumbrance system -- it was a monster to track in real time and not a ton of fun. The GM did say that in terms of prep, he found that creating spellcasters and their grimoires or miracles was a massive amount of work. Otherwise, it's only one data point, but it really did play well at the table.