One of the main hallmarks of OSR design is minimalist design. These games want to call back to that feeling of cracking open an ancient boxed set, rolling up a few characters and getting players into a fantasy world without a lot of worrying about rules, optimization or ten page character histories. Outcast Silver Raiders, featuring design by Isaac VanDuyn, art by Kim Diaz Holm and calligraphy/cartography by Lex Rocket, leans into many of the concepts and artistic choices of OSR games. But as I dug into the handsome three book boxed set provided to me as a review copy from Exalted Funeral, I saw something that I didn’t expect. This is a game that takes the DIY approach of OSR games deeper to allow gaming groups to use it as a toolset to create their own stripped down dark fantasy game. Did the game bring home that handcrafted feel while looking like the books have been soaked in blood? Let’s play to find out.
All three books feature art by Holm with an art style done up in red, black and white. It gives the game a beautiful, ragged look. The three part cover image is the kind of thing parents wrapped up in the Satanic Panic of the 80s had nightmares about. The art is of an excellent quality throughout the books. Holm has a great sense of when detail makes a piece stand out, usually when illustrating the humans that inhabit this world. But when it comes time to show the monsters, all it takes are a few slashes of color and darkness to invoke the kind of beings that make their homes in dark caves and nightmare. A lot of games aspire to a heavy metal aesthetic. Outcast Silver Rangers is the first one since Mork Borg that really made me want to throw up the horns while reading it.
The first book presents what feels like a pretty classic OSR system. The Player’s Guide presents characters made with six ability scores rolled straight through that are then fit into one of three classes. But even here, VanDuyn starts to lay out some interesting possibilities. If a character’s ability modifiers don’t balance to zero, that character is trashed and a new one is rolled up…but the trashed character lives on as a dead sibling in the back story of the character that eventually makes it though. It’s an interesting way to highlight the harshness of the world but also to get players thinking about the narrative behind their character. Was poor dead Gabriel the first victim of your sorcerer’s lust for blood magic? Did you start a career as a Rogue after your sister Ursula was caught and hanged as a thief?
Each system in the game uses a different die type for resolution: a d6 for skills, a d10 for saves and a d20 for combat. I usually prefer more unified resolution mechanics but these were easy to remember in play. Classes are also pretty simple with the Warrior, Rogue and Sorceror starting out with some fun abilities. Progression generally means they get to use them more times before a rest rather than new shinies at each level. The Warrior gets to choose a blow that automatically hits an opponent or make an opponent miss them. The Rogue can reroll skills or saving throws. My favorite is the sorcerer who can cut themselves with their ritual blood magic dagger to either harm, help or heal. It’s a dark method of magic that keeps spell lists to a minimum and reinforces the darkness of the main setting.
If the Player’s Guide strips things down to a bare minimum, the Referee’s Compendium is where a group can build things back up. It’s full of advice on how to run the game in the style the designers intended with discussions on how to hand out treasure, how to track time and how to handle players who steal enough silver to afford a stronghold. It also has rules for things that turn Outcast Silver Raiders into a more traditional fantasy RPG, such as fantasy ancestries, magic items and expanded classes. Each of these is viewed in the warped funhouse mirror of the game, but they give groups the option of adding some classic concepts back in. The spell list, for example, recasts some classic spells in as dark rituals full of demons, blood and gore. There’s also some helpful discussion about how to integrate these ideas into a game as part of its progression, such as giving players whose characters have died first dibs on playing a new class like a barbarian or monk. I can see a group who sticks with this game for a bit watching their world grow from a savage land of sword and sorcery to something more akin to a classic fantasy world. Using Outcast Silver Raiders to generate the legends of the "fallen age long ago" that then translate into a more typical D&D game sounds like it could be fun with players in for the long haul. Even if the default setting is one modeled on Europe with the Church and real world place names.
The Mythic North is the book out of the set that anyone in love with another OSR system should consider picking up. This is where all the encounter charts live along with the hexcrawl advice, antagonists and locations keyed into the big map. Because these elements are in their own book, there are 30 locations that are given two page spreads with full maps like those in Forbidden Lands or Trilemma Adventures. These places could be used in any game of a similar style. This book also includes several campaign frames with my favorite really leaning into the Raiders part of the game's title. Players come together to break out of prison and spend most of the campaign on the run as part bandit, part tomb raider. It seems like a good way to run, if not a capital E evil campaign, at least one where the players are anti-heroes at best. When you’re hanging around with blood sorcerers, you’re probably not the good guys.
Bottom line: Outcast Silver Rangers provides a great toolbox to build your own OSR game or to stock plenty of intriguing, dark ideas in one that you already love.
