Osprey Games is Getting into Role-Playing Games

Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you:

No adverts like this in the forums anymore.
Times and dates in your local timezone.
Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance.
Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely.
Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net.

If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

**Easy E**

Not really my cup of tea for designing RPGs, but for those into it...

https://ospreypublishing.com/blog/cat/osprey-games/post/announcement_osprey_roleplaying/

Osprey Games is delighted to announce the November 2019 launch of Osprey Roleplaying, a new series of beautifully illustrated, hardback RPG rulebooks that transport players to incredible worlds and extraordinary adventures. The series debuts with two titles: Romance of the Perilous Land: A Roleplaying Game of British Folklore, created by award-winning designer Scott Malthouse, and Graham Rose’s Paleomythic: A Roleplaying Game of Stone and Sorcery.

In Romance of the Perilous Land, players take on the role of brave knights, fierce warriors, and other heroes as they fight evil, right wrongs, and create their own legends in Arthurian Britain.

Paleomythic sees players attempt to navigate their way through the harsh prehistoric land of Ancient Mu – a world where hostile tribes, otherworldly spirits, ferocious beasts, and other monstrous creatures threaten their survival at every turn.

Speaking about the new series, Philip Smith, Head of Osprey Games, said “I’m thrilled that we are finally able to announce the first titles in our new line of RPGs. We’ve been working with some great designers and artists on games from a range of genres, and there’s more to come – watch this space!”

**Lance845**

The first game is sounds generic. The second could be cool. Stone age with mysticism and dinosaurs.

But settings are just that. Until I see some mechanics they are both a big meh.

**Voss**

Yeah, thinking kind of the same thing. While the second game is certainly less common, the blurb tells us little- its still pretty generic and has no IP attached (Mu is public domain myth, and spirits, beasts and creatures couldn't be less descriptive).

Titles incorporating a name like 'Graham Rose's XXXX' always worry me too, especially if I don't recognize the name. And a quick search turns up a back catalog of... nothing.

He's got a bio on the Osprey page though... he's a cop.
And he went on a lot of vacations.

About the Author

When Graham Rose discovered roleplaying games, he was hooked. He designed his first home-brew RPG in the 1980s and has continued tinkering with games ever since. It was whilst roleplaying that Graham decided to acquire as many of the abilities listed on his character sheet as possible. This quest has led to a wide range of interests, from archaeology to competition fencing, a career in the fields of intelligence and law enforcement, and has also resulted in him crashing a snowmobile in the Arctic Circle, enduring serious illness in Kathmandu, coming face to face with a silverback gorilla in Rwanda, and walking Hadrian’s Wall during a storm. Graham lives in the UK with his wife, Nicola, and currently works as a cold case homicide investigator.

The guy for the other game (even if its generic Arthuriana) at least has some published materials in his background (no idea if they're good):

About the Author:
Scott Malthouse is a roleplaying game designer and folklore enthusiast who was born and bred in Yorkshire, where he currently lives. His work includes the award-winning Quill (Best Free Game 2016, Indie RPG Awards), In Darkest Warrens, and Unbelievably Simple Roleplaying.

https://ospreypublishing.com/blog/announcement_osprey_roleplaying/

**SamusDrake**

Gotta love Opsrey.

Both rpgs seem inline with their target audience(historical and mythology) and will do well. Being Osprey they will most likely be simple rpgs rather than the indepth D&D fare. The authors are sound enough, although Graham Rose is a mystery save for his background in non-rpg products, which might translate well into roleplay all the same.

Personally, I read the adventure books such as FIghting Fantasy and Way of the Tiger. That would be cool if Osprey did a few of those...

**Voss**

There is no profession where 'unknown with no relevant portfolio or experience' qualifies as 'sound enough.' Especially not authors- it just means unpublished and unknown.

Literally anyone who's been into gaming for a couple decades could write a similar bio for themselves, just change jobs and switch the travel to other 'fun facts' that sound cool. How many RPG or wargame players haven't tinkered with game mechanics?

**Lance845**

Yeah... games especially can be complex products with often seemingly disconnected systems that can impact and influence each other and the over all game play experience in ways a lot of people don't think about.

You need a very strong critical mind to map those things and plan for them to build the experience you want. A portfolio of nothing doesn't mean the product will be bad but it certainly doesn't inspire any hope.

**SamusDrake**

A career in policing - especially when they accept you for Intelligence - suggests more than just a strong critical mind. While he has no past history of roleplay projects, his skills are very applicable to the field of roleplay itself.

Weighing in everything Osprey have told us about Graham Rose, he is sound enough for a one-off rpg that costs £20. I hold Osprey in high regard for consistent quality and so their confidence in Grahman gives me confidence. Out of the two products shown, I'd go for Paleomythic as the setting is more appealing and the author sounds capable of delivering a half-decent game.

**Lance845**

bs. Law enforcement in the USA is like 80% beat cops. And the rest of them are not using the same kinds of thought processes.

NOTHING in that list suggests anything to do with professional game design.

**SamusDrake**

Lance, If you don't agree then that is fine but do keep it civil.

**Lance845**

I didn't insult you. I am keeping it civil. I am sorry if you don't like being disagreed with. I don't owe you tip toeing around a bad argument. I call um like I see them. If you can make a strong case for how someone who has jumped in and out of like 10 different professions for the last couple decades could ever get promoted high enough in law enforcement to actually use any of the critical thinking skills that MIGHT be relevant then I would love to hear it.

But so far what we have is that at some point he was a cop. Which means he mostly sat in a car drinking coffee and pulled people over for speeding. His skills might make him a good role player (in that he has a wide breadth of life experience from which to draw from for his characters) but he's got jack gak for making a game functional and fun.

Try not to take personal offense to things that were not personal or offensive.

**Dr Coconut**

Lance845 wrote:

But so far what we have is that at some point he was a cop. Which means he mostly sat in a car drinking coffee and pulled people over for speeding.

Haven't seen a cop car waiting to pull someone over for speeding for 20+ years. It's all average speed cameras or 'road safety vans' now., which aren't even necessarily run by the police. Budgets and resources are so tight, they don't have time for wasting like that.

Neither book interests me, but I hope they are enough of a success, so they expand the range. Maybe even go into historical rules.... which tie in with their other book ranges

**Lance845**

Dr Coconut wrote:
Lance845 wrote:

But so far what we have is that at some point he was a cop. Which means he mostly sat in a car drinking coffee and pulled people over for speeding.

Haven't seen a cop car waiting to pull someone over for speeding for 20+ years. It's all average speed cameras or 'road safety vans' now., which aren't even necessarily run by the police. Budgets and resources are so tight, they don't have time for wasting like that.

Neither book interests me, but I hope they are enough of a success, so they expand the range. Maybe even go into historical rules.... which tie in with their other book ranges

They tried to use cameras in the USA (and still have them) but they come with the issue that you cannot prove who was driving the car, only who the car is registered to. And the burden of proof is on the prosecution, not the defendant. So here, even if you get mailed a ticket for speeding from a camera, you can just write back "I was not the driver" and it amounts to nothing. Cops pull people over for speeding.

**LordofHats**

Cops laying in wait is pretty common in the US. It's an expenditure of revenue that pays for itself. Some counties in the US make huge chunks of their revenue from getting the business of policing a small strip of highway and dropping the speed limit so they can hand out tickets (usually to people from out of state who won't have the time/energy to contest them). There's one right down the road from my house, where the speed limit sharply drops 20 mph for like, 500 feet, and there's always a pair of cop cars sitting there and waiting and sheriff hangs out at a diner right at the corner of the intersection because his only real job is making sure he hands out enough tickets for the county seat 20 miles in the other direction can tout how much money it made this fiscal year.

I can certainly see that maybe the guy has some investigative chops perhaps. Police officers do get that kind of training, but honestly, having skills is one thing. Applying skills is another. The application of critical thinking and analysis in building rule sets is completely different from how you apply it in police work. I feel like that's kind of obvious.

If he really wanted to tout being a cop as credentials for game design, then he should have designed a film noir or pulp action game, and that might encourage more confidence cause at least the game would be about something he knew.

**Easy E**

All game designers who get published need to start somewhere. That is one thing I have liked about the Osprey Wargame series. A good mix of stuff from a variety of authors of various backgrounds at a good price. I would never play all the games, but I almost always walk away from one with something of interest to think about.

On a related note, I think the most important aspect a game designer needs is the ability to finish a project. Everything else is secondary if you can't ever finish a game enough to play.

**Lance845**

Im not saying the guy CANT make a good game. I am saying nothing in his profile makes me think he CAN.

**Voss**

Easy E wrote:
All game designers who get published need to start somewhere.

Yep. Generally they write for periodicals (much of that has moved to digital services now), contests or freelance for bigger companies, and/or try to self-publish. Basically try to get stuff out there until some company notices, but that leads a paper trail of past work that people can look at.
Most of the people who write RPG products have a very long list of things they worked on before they were 'successful' at it.

Which is the point- as Lance says, nothing about this guy says he can or can't write a game. He's John 'Generic Gamer' Doe.
There may be a 10 page subsystem about flint-knapping, or hunting may be a single contested pass/fail roll on a d6. No way of knowing.

**Nurglitch**

Maybe he's one of those guys that recommends people engage in roleplaying rather than intricate dice-rolling procedures. There's literally no way to pre-judge this.

**Manchu**

Certainly one does wonder how the folks who get their games published by Osprey do so ...

**SamusDrake**

1366: A Medieval Oddity, Second Edition by Graham Rose.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/111240/1366-Second-Edition

**Easy E**

Manchu wrote:
Certainly one does wonder how the folks who get their games published by Osprey do so ...

1. You send a good pitch through the submission process.

2. Osprey checks the market conditions, connects with their trade partners, talks about it in production pipeline meetings, and then decides it they want it. This can take some time.

3. If they do, they like to look at a draft of the rules to see where you are with it and if the product is matching with the pitch

4. Then send you a contract.

Honestly, one of the biggest considerations is where does the art come from (previous books or new material) and what the market all ready has in the genre. The mechanics are of much lower importance as they are looking for a market niche or genre to fill first.

It helps it you can point to a track record of hitting deadlines in the past and previous work. They also like if you have a bit of a network in the game industry. These last two are optional.

At least, that has been my impression from working with them. I maybe way off base!

**SamusDrake**

Men of Bronze looks interesting. Easy E, are you considering further games with Osprey?

**AndrewGPaul**

Voss wrote:

Titles incorporating a name like 'Graham Rose's XXXX' always worry me too, especially if I don't recognize the name. And a quick search turns up a back catalog of... nothing.

I don't think that's the title. They already said "<title 1> by <author 1>, so they mixed up the word order to make the paragraph less repetitive.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Lance845 wrote:

But so far what we have is that at some point he was a cop.

Did you not read the article in the OP? He's not some constable in a silver Astra - he's a homicide detective.

If he really wanted to tout being a cop as credentials for game design,

I don't think that's what the "about the author" blurb is for.

**Easy E**

SamusDrake wrote:
Men of Bronze looks interesting. Easy E, are you considering further games with Osprey?

That is all W.I.P. as I am not sure I have the games they need to fill the niches they are targeting.

**SamusDrake**

Easy E wrote:
SamusDrake wrote:
Men of Bronze looks interesting. Easy E, are you considering further games with Osprey?

That is all W.I.P. as I am not sure I have the games they need to fill the niches they are targeting.

Oh, I see. Well, good luck with what may come next.

**GrahamRose**

Voss wrote:
Yeah, thinking kind of the same thing. While the second game is certainly less common, the blurb tells us little- its still pretty generic and has no IP attached (Mu is public domain myth, and spirits, beasts and creatures couldn't be less descriptive).

Titles incorporating a name like 'Graham Rose's XXXX' always worry me too, especially if I don't recognize the name. And a quick search turns up a back catalog of... nothing.

He's got a bio on the Osprey page though... he's a cop.
And he went on a lot of vacations.

Hi,
I'm Graham Rose, the author of Paleomythic. It's heartening to see some discussion about the game; comments (good or bad) at least show I've grabbed someones attention!
To address your points; yes, I've travelled a lot! The travel in the bio is really meant to highlight how RPGs inspired me to, quite literally, change my life. Many years ago, I was playing Call of Cthulhu and remarked that it'd be interesting to learn all of the things on the character sheet. After some rumination, I decided to do just that - this is what lead me to study various subjects, and travel to places to have experiences as close to RPGs as I could. I've still not gained all of the skills and knowledge on the character sheet, but I have ticked a few off.
For my gaming credentials, you're right to point out that you'll find little searching the web. Some of the stuff I've done is obscure and rare these days...
I started roleplaying in the 80s (BECMI D&D, then RQ, CoC and, over the years, many others). I wrote my first RPG in the mid 80's, which these days you'd probably call a D&D clone - it was a fantasy game based on the dragon riders of pern novels. It was unpublished; like a lot of my writing it was done for the love of RPGs rather than any desire for success.
I created quite a few other RPGs after that, two of which were small press published in the early 90s. This was still early days for the net; these games were physical copies, and a very limited print run. One of these was a modern day RPG which conceived of an international agency that looked into crime, espionage, the paranormal and the occult. The other was a fantasy game based on the premise; 'what happens to the fantasy characters that die'? It featured a bleak fantasy world (essentially hell), with characters trying to escape it.
I've had some non gaming essays and the like published, but I used to write under a pseudonym so you won't find them with a search of my name.
More recently, i decided it was time to publish one of my RPGs on Drivethru - this was '1366', a medieval fantasy game (the original dating back to 2013). I had no desire to try to earn a living or anything with this - I wrote it to try out some ideas I had about mechanics, and because most FRPGS don't seem to fully capture the medieval period in the way I would wish. I followed this with an early version of Paleomythic, which was on Drivethru for a good while before someone at Osprey spotted it and approached me. I hadn't made any attempt to get the games published by other companies (though another company had previously approached me with an offer for both games, which I refused). The business side of game creation doesn't really interest me at all, I write because I love it. I should add that I didn't really think this info warranted detailing in the Osprey bio - it all seems rather dull info to me.
I hope you have a look at Paleo when it is published. It's not perfect; like many RPGs its' flawed, and as I write now I could probably come up with several aspects that I'd change. That's a problem all writers have I think. Paleo represents my effort to create a game that evokes a specific genre, and I've tried to write it so that when you sit down to play, you can look at your character and feel like you're there. I've thought about some core principles of RPGs, and challenged myself to come up with ways to use them or change them in such a way that it doesn't detract from the setting, and so that players feel like they're part of a story as much as a game. I guess we'll see what people think fairly soon!

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Did you not read the article in the OP? He's not some constable in a silver Astra - he's a homicide detective.

- yep there's a variety of police roles in the UK (I can't comment on US police organisation).

I've made some comments on the bio in another post - essentially the bio was 'some interesting stuff about the author'. I guess there are transferable skills between law enforcement work and rpg design, not really given it that much thought to be honest. It's not intended to establish my game credentials - I'll leave my writing to do that (which might be naive of me I suppose).

I've never arrested anyone for speeding (or anything traffic related for that matter). Sitting in a car drinking coffee (and eating doughnuts, which I think is the stereotype) isn't done by any cop I know. The more you drink, the more you need to take a leak, and the nature of the job means we're often in areas where people are less inclined to let us use their toilets. I know some surveillance officers actively dehydrate themselves to avoid this problem, then take pain killers for the headaches.

Cold Case Homicide work involves looking into unsolved murders, so a lot of research, examining historic documents and so on. It also features examining new forensic leads, intelligence analysis and open source research. There are some covert aspects too on occasion. This, as you might imagine, differs from the day to day cop work quite a lot.

Hope that helps give you a bit of an insight!