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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gus L" data-source="post: 9429608" data-attributes="member: 7045072">Sure and maybe?The fairytale setting gloss has been around a while.  In the Mid OSR days gonzo and grimdark battled it out for official "OSR" aesthetic and I guess grimdark largely won.  It's never been the only thing though? Currently dark fairytale has a bit of an upsurge, and it's not a bad thing - grimdark is a bit stale after 10 years or more. I suspect this is mostly Dolemwood's doing, but I could be wrong.  False Machine has always been interested in the style as have other OSR bloggers and designers, and I think lighter crunch/classic rules/high lethality systems today benefit from an aesthetic that separates them from the expectations of vanilla/vernacular/high fantasy that mark 5th edition and similar contemporary traditional systems.  As long as an adventure makes it clear that it's breaking with the modern D&D expectations it can succeed because players expectations are different. Players in a fairy tale setting or grim dark setting don't expect to be heroic all the time, they expect to be the underdogs and in both (at least the darker sort of fairytale) its possible, even likely that characters might fail or die.</blockquote>