Why GLOG & How GLOG

Written for Oblidisideryptch's challenge/appeal/question thing floating around #glog-ghetto. 

Why GLOG?

In short, because GLOG is the most OSR of the OSR systems. 

I'm a relatively recent convert to the OSR scene. I only started getting interested in the scene around a year ago, and I've only been playing and running OSR games for the past few months, barring a couple of Knave oneshots. 

Here's why I got into the OSR, coming from a deep-5e background:

1. Lower-stakes stories, but higher tension. You've got fewer hitpoints, lower levels, and less gold, but the bits and pieces you do earn are all the sweeter. 
2. Simplified rules. There's less fiddly bits, there's less page-flipping, there's less crunch between you and the game. 
3. Flexibility, and ease of hacking. People in the 5e space (and parts of the indie/storygame space, tbh) get very squirrelly and defensive about hacking. I hacked a lot of 5e, and it took a lot of convincing to get people to come on board. In the OSR, hacking is the norm; it would be weird to run a game that was entirely by-the-book.
4. Community, and more specifically the broad range of hacks and adventures and options available. Yeah, 5e's got the DM's Guild and stuff, but the OSR has people churning out good free content near-constantly.
5. WOTC is shitty. Yes, the OSR has problems with this (some of the same ones, too, like the Stricken One), but because it's decentralized, it's lot easier to cut out the bad and keep the good.

Of the popular OSR systems (at least the ones I'm aware of), GLOG does these points best. Just to go down the list rapidly:

1. GLOG is always high tension, because your HP is always low. Convictions drive your story. The tech is low. Lots of OSR games do this, but some don't (@DCC).
2. Other than Knave and WoDu (both of which I quite like), GLOG has the best words-to-usefulness ratio I've seen of just about any OSR system. It's compact, it's clean, it's pretty clear. You can hand someone the OG GLOG PDF and they'll get a handle on things quickly. Compare this to, say, OSE, where there's lot of arcana to wade through, let alone something Shadow of the Demon Lord.
3. GLOG is deeply, deeply flexible. The base rules are mostly pretty "OSR-standard," which means you can bolt on almost anything to them, tweak them around in lots of different ways, and even write full hacks, and the game will still hold up. It's robust, partially because it's so short, but mostly because it's just well-designed.
4. Community. Out of all of the OSR sub-scenes, GLOG is far and away the most active I've seen. New hacks come out every month, and new classes come out of every week, if not every day. People who play GLOG always make their own versions, and then usually release those versions to the public. It means there's always people discussing the game, and there's always new and interesting things happening.
5. As far as I know, Arnold's not a shitty person, and neither are any of the other well-known GLOG people, like Skerples. So that puts us ahead of WOTC, Lamentations, and whatever Frog God's publishing these days. 

So yeah. GLOG embodies the things I like about the OSR the most. Also, it's free, and it's got a funny name. 

How GLOG?

Step 1. Read the original GLOG, plus the Goblin Guts and the Wizard bits. Make sure to read the theory sections at the beginning and end. 

Step 2. Read some other OSR stuff. Some theory-ish stuff, like Principia Apocrypha; some systems, like Knave, World of Dungeons, B/X (don't buy this, find a copy), Jared Sinclair's 6e, Troika!, and something by Kevin Crawford; some adventures & settings, like Veins of the Earth, the Stygian Library, the Ultraviolet Grasslands, Kidnap the Archpriest, and Barrowmaze; and some classes for GLOG, like the Gothic Villain, the Zouave, Many Goblins, and the Rethought Cleric. Of all of that, see what appeals and sticks with you.

Step 3. Keeping the theory in mind as best you can, smash the systemic stuff from the other games you've read into GLOG. Tweak rules, adjust numbers, and (re-)write whole sections, if you need to.

Step 4. Using whatever OSR monstrosity you've just cobbled together, run through some of the adventures and settings you read earlier. 

Step 5. When things break in a session, adjust them and keep going. Afterwards, try to see why they broke, and fix it. 

Step 6. Repeat steps 2-5, continuing to read more theory, systems, and content. 

At some point, things will stop breaking constantly, and your game will hold together mostly stable. When this happens, you're free to start adding on really wild stuff, which is when it gets fun.

This all sounds kind of flippant, but really, there's no better way to get into GLOG (and the OSR in general), than to just grab whatever's free or cheap, read it, and start playing. It may sound like a trial by fire, and it kind of is, but things won't ever go that wrong.  

My GLOG

It's called the SLOG and it's here!