Old-School Essentials In SPAAAAACE...

Now with 100% more hamster

Get Downsized Dungeons Issue 5 at DriveThru RPG!

Issue 5 of Downsized Dungeons is out now. It was a great comeback from Issue 4. You can’t keep a good dog down, as they say. I’m particularly proud of this one for a few reasons.  I feel like this issue is a return to my roots, and to my truths as an artist and game writer. It’s fun. It’s weird. It taught me a few things about writing for Old-School Essentials which I had never considered before. 

Tonally, we went weird with this one. I’m a weird dude. The more that I try to please the normies, the more it seems that I fail. Not only is it a failure to me personally, because I’m not out there being my authentic self, but the results are failures. I fall short of my goals and don’t achieve what I set out to do. 

In this issue, I took it back. I did something fun. I did something a little gonzo and brought the Giant Space Hamster to OSE. I like the Giant Space Hamster. I think it’s an adorable concept, and drawing a map with a giant wheel made me smile. 

The style was also a big departure from what I have been doing. See, my first OSE zine (The Pauper’s Page) was pretty high concept. It was a faux-newspaper complete with in-character news articles. It was fun to make, but I felt like it was missing a major piece of successful game design - a call to action. Downsized Dungeons evolved out of that to be that call to action. It was a complete, albeit small, dungeon with dressing and treasure, and stated out with monsters so that it could be dropped into a campaign with no prep. 

Even then, I was still missing something that was unique to OSE. It was the thing that made me fall in love with it so many years ago, and what made me want to write supplements for it. The piece I was still missing was its brevity. 

For this issue, I tried something totally different and used a more OSE conventional style. Instead of lengthy descriptions of areas, it’s short flashes of evocative text with detailed bullet points. Not only does this brevity make it easier to use at the table, but I think it brings something poetic to the dungeon. It’s short but dense writing is packed with imagery meant to stir emotions and provoke thoughts within the GM and the players. It gives enough detail to play as is, and provides a jumping off point to expand the story into any direction it might go. 

From the beginning, I always wanted to bring my voice to a game product. Initially, I was of the belief that this was best served by doing something outside of the box. In pursuit of “originality” I failed to achieve my goals of producing something that only I could do. It was through this exercise in stylistic choice that I feel like I have accomplished what I set out to do. 

Is it a more conventional OSE product? Sure. But is it something that is actually original, and came from me? Absolutely. Additionally, I think there’s a lot of ancillary benefits from that convention. I think it's the sort of thing that OSE fans want out of their supplements. Hopefully that reflects in higher leadership. In the 6 days that Issue 5 has been out, it’s got almost as many downloads as Issue 4, so I consider that a win.

So thank you for reading. Thanks for keeping up with me. Thank you for the support and for everything. If not for all of you, I’d just be a weird dude walking around the neighborhood mumbling about giant space hamsters. 

-Dave Serrette
Founder/Writer/Et. Cetera @Downsized Press